Despite the disorientation Hollywood is experiencing, the show must and should go on. Awards season is a vital part of the industry’s economic ecosystem, as strange as that may sound, encompassing months of special screenings, lunches, and advertising campaigns. It means work for everybody from makeup artists to caterers to freelance entertainment journalists commissioned to do second round interviews with filmmakers whose movies may already be a year old. With the biz still bruised from COVID shutdowns and the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes, canceling this year’s show was never a real consideration.

While the cultural impact of the Oscars—or cinema in general—isn’t what it used to be (my TikTok-captivated niece almost never watches movies because they are “too long”), for many cinephiles, an Academy Award nomination is a blessing, as it often means more esoteric titles will get a wider push in theaters, or make a quicker appearance on a commonly available streaming service. This is particularly felt in the Best International Feature Film category, where a nomination isn’t just a source of pride for the producing nation, but a chance for the work to be seen in the United States beyond one or two screens in New York City.

This year’s selection is eclectic, and if these five films have any connection, it’s that they all have female protagonists. (Well, the gender of the cat in Flow is unknown, but the director said he wants audiences to “see their own cat within this character,” and since my cat is a girl, I’m sticking with this!) The other notable thing is that two of the films in this category are also nominated for Best Picture. That’s a first, though the number of Best Picture nominees expanded from five to 10 in 2009, offering a little more room. Here’s a closer look at what’s been nominated.

Emilia Pérez

directed by Jacques Audiard

Zoe Saldaña (foreground) and Karla Sofía Gascón in Emilia Pérez. Watch the trailer in some markets here.Why Not Productions

The nominee almost guaranteed to win this year is Emilia Pérez, which has delighted and infuriated filmgoers since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival last summer, and which is currently streaming on Netflix. Though set in Mexico (with dialogue mostly in Spanish), it is a French production from director Jacques Audiard, and two of the three main performers, Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, are Hollywood stars. The lead, Karla Sofía Gascón (originally from Spain, but she has worked in Mexico for many years), is the first trans woman to win Best Actress at Cannes and is also the first openly trans person to be nominated for a performing Oscar. (Elliot Page was nominated prior to his transition.) She had a decent shot at winning the Oscar, too, until it was recently discovered that her X/Twitter account was rife what could best be called “problematic remarks,” offering some surprising opinions on Muslims, George Floyd, and even Adolf Hitler. She has since deleted her account. This PR hiccup will probably not affect the movie’s chances, only hers.

In the film, which has the extravagant flavor of a Mexican telenovela or an Italian opera, Gascón plays a male drug lord, Juan, who hires Saldaña, an underappreciated lawyer, to facilitate a gender reassignment surgery. At first you think this is someone looking for a foolproof way to masquerade their identity, but we soon see the desire is real. Juan’s death is faked and she becomes Emilia and leaves her wife (Gomez) and children. Then the story turns into a Mrs. Doubtfire-like screwball scenario, with Emilia posing as Juan’s cousin, and living with the family to be near the kids. Oh, and it’s a musical.

Few could accuse Emilia Pérez of not being a big swing, but a great number of trans critics have condemned the film. GLAAD called it a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman,” and others have decried the use of what are perceived to be clichés, like a trans woman being a killer; a trans person abandoning their family after transition; treating trans identity as a nefarious secret; and describing a trans woman being “half man, half female.” (This last one is done through song.) It has also been the source of mockery and memes (over 9 million views on this initiating tweet) among very tuned-in online cinephiles.

Nevertheless, it’s a lock for the award. It leads this year’s Oscars with the most nominations at 13, including Best Picture. (Saldaña is likely to win Best Supporting Actress.) The film has had a huge promotional push from Netflix, which purchased the film’s North American and British rights after Cannes in a bidding war. Though trans critics may be crying foul, mainstream Hollywood liberal types will consider this film, which is sympathetic to trans people in its own way, to be progressive. This is reminiscent of how many Black critics characterized the Civil Rights-era film Green Book reactionary, yet it still won Best Picture in 2019.

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I’m Still Here

directed by Walter Salles

The nominee with the best chance of upsetting Emilia Peréz is I’m Still Here, from Brazilian director Walter Salles, a director who sometimes works in Hollywood. His best known previous film is The Motorcycle Diaries, a portrait of young Che Guevara. I’m Still Here, based on a true story, is mostly set in the early 1970s, during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Fernanda Torres stars as Eunice Paiva, mother of five children and wife to Ruben Paiva, an ex-politician who was brought in for questioning one day by police and was never heard from again.

What makes this movie so special is its frog-in-a-boiling-pot approach. The first 20 minutes barely have any plot at all—we’re just with this fantastic, boisterous family in their lively house by the beach, watching them play foosball, listen to records, and pal around with a new puppy. Over time, though, we realize that there are too many intellectuals and booksellers hanging around to avoid the ire of a hard-right regime. Torres is mesmerizing in the central role, desperately trying to keep her family together, while searching for information about her husband. The final confirmation, years in the making, is an avalanche of mixed emotions. Despite an attempt by current right-wing elements to boycott the movie, it has been a financial success in Brazil.

Like Gascón, Torres is also nominated for Best Actress, and I’m Still Here is also nominated for Best Picture. It is not yet on a streaming platform, but is currently in theaters.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

directed by Mohammad Rasoulof

The nominee whose behind-the-scenes story has the best chance to become a movie of its own one day is The Seed of the Sacred Fig. The film, a German production in Farsi, comes from Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof. Like several other Iranian filmmakers, he has been subjected to censorship and arrest in the past, and as Sacred Fig was announced as part of 2024’s main competition in Cannes, he was sentenced to be flogged, imprisoned for eight years, and to have his property confiscated. He fled—initially on foot—to Germany, where he remains. (He still made it to the French Riviera to walk the festival’s red carpet and receive a special jury prize.)

Why such a fuss? Well, the movie is sympathetic to the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protesters, with our main characters offering sanctuary to a student wanted for questioning after getting her head bashed in. It also takes a jaundiced view of the legal system. Indeed, the story’s paterfamilias is a mid-level bureaucrat given a nice promotion but expected to rubber stamp guilty verdicts. Despite his position, he is unaware of the revolution happening in his own home.

While this is certainly very serious material—and the actresses took great personal risk to perform without wearing a hijab, which is against the law even for movie scenes set in a person’s home—the film is also extremely entertaining, with the last act essentially turning into an action picture. The film is not yet streaming but is playing in theaters in select cities.

The Girl with the Needle,

directed by Magnus von Horn

The nominee most likely to invade your subconscious and disturb you with disquieting dreams is The Girl with the Needle, a movie that only grows more horrifying when you learn it is based on a true story. A Danish production from Swedish-born director Magnus von Horn, a graduate of Poland’s highly regarded Łódź Film School, this eerie, otherworldly black and white drama is a spin on one of Denmark’s most notorious true crime stories.

If you are Danish, you already know all about Dagmar Overbye, but if you come into this movie as I did, you’ll get to experience a moment of “oh my God, what is actually happening here?!” shock, so I’ll keep things vague. Overbye is not the titular girl with the needle, that is Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), an impoverished World War I widow (or so she thinks) who begins what she believes is a life-saving affair with the head of the textile factory where she works. An unexpected pregnancy changes that, as does the return of her husband, who is disfigured from combat. (He’ll soon end up as part of an Elephant Man-esque freak show.) Karoline finds salvation, she believes, with a candy store owner who helps women find new homes for unwanted infants, but by this point in the story you’ve seen enough red flags raised to know something’s not right.

In addition to a remarkable tone, drenched in ominous sound design and high contrast cinematography, the film is daring in having a not particularly likeable lead character take a very slow walk toward redemption. This is a terrific movie with some very gruesome moments. It is currently streaming for subscribers on MUBI and available for digital purchase on other platforms like Amazon.

Flow

directed by Gints Zilbalodis

The nominee that you can (and should) watch with your small child is Flow, a surprise inclusion in the Best International Feature Film category that is also nominated for Best Animated Feature. It is a story about a cat who befriends a dog, a capybara, a lemur, and a whale during a troubling time of environmental unease. It has a microscopic budget, features no dialogue, and was made with an open-source animation program. Its director, Gints Zilbalodis, also recorded the original score, though he does not know how to read music or play any instruments. Everything about this movie is a miracle.

Flow is the first Latvian movie to achieve this broad level of acclaim, though it’s worth noting that one of the architects of early cinema, Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, was Latvian. Eisenstein was revolutionary with creating emotion through editing, and Zilbalodis transforms what at first looks like cheapo computer animation into a marvelous expressiveness—mixing realistic animal behavior with periodic enhancements for dramatic effect. Though the film is resistant to explaining its world, it is clearly an ecologically minded tale, warning of impending floods and the need for disparate personalities to work together if they are to survive. It’s quite likely that the recent Los Angeles catastrophe aided the film in getting its two nominations. Flow is currently in theaters and also available for digital rental or purchase on platforms like Amazon.