Boy howdy, are we gonna start some fires this week.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science this week unveiled the nominees for the upcoming Academy Awards, aka the Oscars.

The most prestigious award of the ceremony is the category of Best Picture and this year there are 10 films in the running for the crown.

Now, before writing this review, I had seen eight of the 10 films nominated, the two not seen being The Brutalist (I will get to it, it’s just a long movie) and Emilia Perez.

Of the eight I had seen, I mostly understood why they were nominated and before writing my prediction clip, I thought it best to watch the remaining two, starting with Emilia Perez as it is easily available on Netflix.

Before I continue, I must address the plot as described by IMDB.

“Emilia Perez is a musical/thriller that follows four remarkable women in Mexico, each pursuing their own happiness. Cartel leader Emilia enlists unappreciated lawyer Rita to help fake her death so that she can finally live authentically as her true self.”

Holy crap!

This is a warning for people who like music, diversity in media that isn’t clearly pandering and scripts that aren’t written as pure Oscar bait!

I just can’t fathom how this film has been put in the same category as films such as Conclave, Dune, Nickleboys and The Substance. It’s hot garbage.

From the get-go, the musical aspect of the film is used as nothing more than a gimmick to help settle the incredibly uneven tone of this film. The issue with this is that the songs are such basic, written under duress nonsense, that the plot, which the musical numbers strangely try to overshadow, becomes more of a joke than a serious conversation about sense of self and discovery.

The characters don’t do anything for the debate this movie is trying to have either.

The story contains themes about Mexican culture, its war on drugs and the challenges of coming out as transgender and it fails to fairly represent any of these difficult topics.

Instead of hiring Mexican actors to play Mexican roles, director Jacques Audiard decided to hire a Spanish woman, a woman from the Dominican Republic and an American in the lead roles and filmed it in France. In a film that’s meant to be about diversity and Mexican culture, how is this acceptable?

The Mexican community feels the same way too. Esteemed and award-winning Mexican screenwriter Hector Guillen heavily criticised the Academy and the Golden Globes for its nomination of the film by tweeting, “Mexico hates Emilia Perez/ ‘Racist Euro Centrist Mockery’/ Almost 500K dead and France decides to do a musical”.

Many members of the LGBTIQ+ community have also criticised the film, with the advocacy group Glaad describing it as a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman”.

It then begs the question, who is this movie for?

Liberal viewers and Mexican communities despise it, conservatives won’t see it and those who just want to see a well-made movie won’t get that either.

There’s no other way to describe this movie other than as garbage. The fact it won the Golden Globe for Best Musical/Comedy is downright flabbergasting and the fact it was seen as one of the 10 best movies of the year by the Academy is a blight on its credibility.

Emilia Perez is now showing in select theatres or can be viewed by Netflix subscribers with a VPN – but I don’t understand why you would bother.