Emilia Pérez, the not-so-quiet musical, has quickly become this year’s Oscar darling over awards season, racking up 13 Academy Award nominations, three more than any other film. It is one of the more divisive Best Picture nominations in recent memory. Critics like it but don’t love it, as evidenced by its 75% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes and 71 on Metacritic. Those scores alone suggest it’s one of the year’s better movies, but it is far from a consensus. Worse are the audience scores, with a meager 27% fresh Rotten Tomatoes audience score and 6.2 on IMDB. Some are comparing its surge to Crash (2004) and Green Book (2018), two great films that may have earned their Best Picture Academy Award wins, based more on where we were in American society during those periods than on the timeless quality of the movie itself. While that is not something I would say, I would agree that neither film was the best of those years. I have Crash as my sixth favorite and Green Book as my third favorite movie of the year. Similarly, Emilia Pérez is not the best movie of 2024, but it will finish in my top ten. Like those above, it’s not perfect, and its timely, topical relevance is a factor of its generated steam.

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