France’s revamped Oscar committee has selected Jacques Audiard’s exhilarating redemption thriller “Emilia Perez” for the international feature film race. The movie won two major awards at the Cannes Film Festival along and earned rave reviews.
“Emilia Perez” stars Karla Sofía Gascón as a fearsome drug lord who embraces his true self as a woman. The Spanish-language film earned one of Cannes’s longest standing ovations and went on to win the Jury Prize (in a jury presided over by Greta Gerwig), on top of a Best Actress Prize for the ensemble cast, including Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz. The movie was bought by Netflix for the U.S. and the U.K. following its Cannes premiere.
Audiard is a revered French auteur who won a Palme d’Or with “Dheepan,” was previously nominated for a foreign-language Oscar with “A Prophet.”
“Emilia Perez” was one one of the three movies shortlisted by France’s Oscar committee, along with “The Count of Monte Cristo,” a critically acclaimed epic adventure film adapted from Alexandre Dumas’ classic; and Alain Guiraudie’s offbeat thriller “Misericordia.”
The selection was done in two rounds by a new Oscar committee which was presided over by Charles Tesson, the former artistic director of Cannes’ Critics Week, and included “Emmanuelle” director Audrey Diwan who won Venice’s Golden Lion with “Happening” in 2021; critically acclaimed French playwright, director and producer Florian Zeller (“The Father”); former Lionsgate boss Patrick Wachsberger; international sales veterans Carole Baraton from Charades, and Gregoire Melin from Kinology; powerful French distributor Michèle Halberstadt from ARP Selection; producers Rosalie Varda (“Faces Places”) from Ciné-Tamaris, Nadim Cheikhroua (“Olfa’s Daughters”) and David Thion (“Anatomy of a Fall”) at Les Films Pelléas; and actor Clemence Poesy.
As part of the process, producers, sales agents and U.S. distributors of all three shortlisted films were auditioned today (Sept. 18) by the committee.
