Last week, the nominees for the 2025 Academy Awards were announced. The leading contender with 13 total nominations? Emilia Pérez, a French-produced Spanish-language musical about a transgender Mexican drug lord and her underappreciated girlboss defense attorney. The film lost around $15 million at the box office on a relatively modest $26 million budget, so if you haven’t seen it, you likely aren’t alone and shouldn’t feel bad—it wasn’t made for you anyway.
Emilia Pérez is what people call Oscar bait: the sort of film that is made, seemingly, for the express purpose of catching the attention of the approximately 10,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Mostly film-industry insiders, their tastes are predictable. They like austere dramas and social commentary—stories that will make you cry while also attempting to say something about politics. Think of 2016’s Moonlight, a tragedy about a poor, gay drug dealer that grossed $65 million worldwide at the box office. It beat La La Land, which grossed $509 million worldwide, to the title of Best Picture. Or think of Nomadland, which won Best Picture in 2020: It follows a homeless widow who travels the country in a van after losing her job in the Great Recession.
The tastes of the academy are so predictable that they’ve been delightfully parodied—most succinctly perhaps in a 2008 episode of American Dad!, in which Roger the Alien takes on a supervillain persona and produces a film called Oscar Gold about an intellectually disabled Jewish alcoholic whose puppy dies of cancer while he’s hiding in an attic during the Holocaust. The movie is intended to make viewers cry themselves to death.
Late Night with Seth Meyers did a similar parody in 2017, producing a trailer for a fictional film simply called Oscar Bait featuring “racial tension,” “latent homosexuality,” the French language, and “dialogue that feels sort of profound.”
A conservative might say the film industry is being used to produce far-left propaganda, but the truth is the politics of Oscar bait typically run a few years behind progressive ideology du jour. Case in point: Emilia Pérez wasn’t good enough trans representation for the professional scolds over at the ultra-leftist GLAAD, the LGBTQ media watchdog, but it was good enough for the liberal boomers running the academy. They also loved 2018’s Green Book, a movie about a black musician and his friendly but slightly racist Italian American driver—even though The New York Times called it a “racial reconciliation fantasy,” and 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, which was deemed a “white savior story” by The Atlantic.
Typically, Oscar bait receives a lot of hype before underperforming at the box office then fading into obscurity. I haven’t thought about Green Book since it stoked a debate about whether or not black and white people are allowed to be friends in movies. Remember The Artist, nominated for 10 Academy Awards in 2012? I doubt it. It was a black-and-white, partially silent French film about an alcoholic actor in Depression-era Hollywood—perhaps the most Oscar-baity film ever made. I’ve never met anyone who has seen 2022’s Best Picture winner, CODA—a coming of age film about the hearing daughter of a deaf fisherman who aspires to become a singer—and I also don’t know anyone who liked Emilia Pérez (which has a 24 percent Popcornmeter approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes). And I hang out with snobs! Not even Mexicans like it. When the film hit theaters south of the border, there were so many refund requests a government consumer-protection agency had to become involved.
Sure, some Oscar bait, such as 1994’s Forrest Gump, makes an enduring mark on pop culture. But too many movies suffer for being surgically designed to hit all the right buttons for approximately 10,000 Hollywood insiders.
Art is not a democracy, nor should it be. If it were, we’d have Funko Pops in the Louvre. But a balance can be—and sometimes is—struck between profundity and watchability. Oppenheimer is a good example from 2023, as is the campy body horror The Substance from 2024. We need more of that. If the academy stopped feeling flattered when studios clamor for their attention and started feeling embarrassed, maybe we’d get it. But I won’t hold my breath.
