Strangely, improbably, as we move toward Oscar season, there are two trans films that are considered serious contenders for major awards – including one that could possibly even land best picture.
To say that this has never happened before is an understatement. The Oscars tend to be an extremely heteronormative affair – you have to go back to 2017 to see the last time Hollywood honored a queer-themed film for best picture with Moonlight, and looking back before that, the LGBTQ+ representation is very, very sparse. What you’ll find even less of is trans representation at the Oscars – the Academy awards had existed for 89 years before a single film platforming a trans story with a trans actor won any award at all (it was A Fantastic Woman in 2018, in which its star, Daniela Vega, helped it win best foreign language film) and there has been very little since.
How strange then that this year features two strong trans-oriented Oscar contenders. These are both Netflix movies that have been mostly viewed in people’s living rooms, only briefly being screened in actual movie theaters in order to make them viable for Oscar contention. And they could not be more different – one is the tear-jerking documentary Will & Harper, and the other an incandescently loopy cinematic opera titled Emilia Pérez.
After scooping up four nominations at the European Film Awards, including for best film, Pérez is considered a contender for major awards like best picture, director and actress – needless to say, a win in any of these categories would be an astonishing step forward for trans representation. Will & Harper has been predicted to land on the list of best documentary contenders, as well as potentially picking up an Oscar for best song.
It’s interesting to wonder how we got here, especially amid a presidential campaign that has featured an unprecedented level of Republican vitriol towards trans people. It is both reassuring and a little surreal to see such potentially robust trans representation at the Oscars at a time when the community is feeling an existential threat due to an enormous outpouring of anti-trans hate legislation, and the promise of much worse under a Republican trifecta in the federal government. If we do manage to snag best picture, it may be cold comfort amid a humanitarian disaster.
It’s also bizarrely pleasing to imagine these two depictions of the trans experience potentially sharing center stage on Oscar night. Will & Harper is a very earnest story about coming out, allyship, and the shifting landscape for trans people in America. It’s an offbeat little skit of a movie that aims to warm your heart. By contrast, Emilia Pérez struts in studded with glam, glitz and everything that could conceivably shine or sparkle – it’s an absolute hurricane. Far from a sentimental coming-out story, it centers around the fable-like transformation of a Mexican drug lord into a cartel-fighting wonder woman.
These movies are being proposed for Oscars for very different reasons. Will & Harper has been framed as an “important” movie in terms of relations between trans and cis people (some had even hoped that the goodwill it engendered would help win the election for Kamala Harris). It’s positioned as a potentially transformative piece that will help cis people realize that trans people are pretty much just normal folks like them.
Emilia Pérez is more of the traditional Oscar contender, in the sense that it’s enormous, tries to shoehorn about half a dozen “important issues” into its plot, and is being billed as a completely one-off spectacle. In spite of having a trans person at its center, it’s strangely incurious about trans people and tends to rely on regressive stereotypes – albeit in a film so bananas and campy that who really even notices?
These wouldn’t necessarily be the movies I’d choose to represent trans people at the Oscars, but it is nice to even imagine that there is this much room for trans storylines among Hollywood royalty. Were I to guess what makes both of these movies fit for Oscar contention, I would say that it all comes down to the word “audacity”.
The audacity in Will & Harper is simple – the movie’s trans star Harper Steele was audacious simply for the fact that in her 60s she decided to pursue the gender transition that she had wanted all of her life, and then she teamed up with her good friend Will Ferrell to make a movie about it. That’s pretty amazing in and of itself. Karla Sofía Gascón, the actor who plays both the trans woman Emilia Pérez and her prior incarnation Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, is audacious too – she chose to transition at the age of 46, completely reinventing her film and TV career. In Emilia Pérez she convincingly acts and sings as two different sexes – a pretty huge achievement that made her the first trans performer to take the Cannes film festival’s best actress prize (which she shared with her co-stars Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz and Zoe Saldaña).
As audacious as these movies are, another trans film was released this year that I would argue is even more so, albeit in a more classically arthouse kind of way. In my opinion it deserves an Oscar more than either Will & Harper or Emilia Pérez.
I speak of Jane Schoenbrun’s ode to 90s trans teens I Saw the TV Glow. The film, which recently added Martin Scorsese to its list of fans, tells a story less on the level of plot and character than on that of emotion, image, color, texture, sound and motion – in other words, it’s pure cinematic magic. It strains to articulate the uniquely trans experience of having your “egg crack” (ie discovering that you’re trans) in a way that’s never been done before in film – something you think that would make a film Oscar-worthy but that in fact landed it in the red with a paltry $5.3m box office. (Pérez, which had a limited theatrical release and is primarily being seen on Netflix, has grossed nearly double that.) It’s not that the film wasn’t successful in its ambitions, just that a movie that successfully immerses you in the liminal terrain of inarticulable identity isn’t a real crowd-pleaser.
It’s pretty remarkable that 2024 has seen three trans films that are all audacious in their own ways – and that loudly and proudly declare themselves as trans movies. (It wasn’t so long ago that a movie like The Matrix had to hide in plain sight as a trans allegory.) I think it’s a major thing that they’re collectively doing so much to inscribe trans storylines into mainstream film (even if only one of them was written or directed by a trans person). But I do worry for the safety of those involved. If Steele, Gascón and Schoenbrun do end up at the Oscars, I hope they’re good at holding it, as the GOP could conceivably have criminalized their use of the bathroom by then. Ohio recently became the 15th state to vote in an anti-transgender bathroom bill, and extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene have explicitly stated their intentions to use their power to harm trans people now that the Republicans fully control the federal government. We might see a completely different kind of trans representation on screens in 2025.
