“Portraying a Mexico full of stereotypes”: Fans Rip Selena Gomez’s ‘Emilia Pérez’ to Shreds Over Golden Globes 2025 Win After Wicked Lost
- Selena Gomez plays one of the lead characters in musical crime comedy, Emilia Pérez.
- The movie is facing criticism for a number of plausible reasons despite its Golden Globe win.
- Even a Mexican actor could not help but express his criticism about Gomez' acting.
2024 was quite the year for Selena Gomez, who not only starred in several projects but also got engaged to boyfriend Benny Blanco. However, not everything she did went well with the fans who barely held back, whether it’s appreciation or criticism. Now that her movie Emilia Pérez has won the Golden Globe award for Best Musical or Comedy over Wicked, fans are even more flabbergasted.
Initially, everyone was quite excited about Gomez’s musical crime comedy film. The promotion and marketing were the best that they could be. However, things took a completely different turn when the movie was finally released and fans realized that this movie was hardly a representation of the Mexican culture that it claims to show.
Fans are absolutely unimpressed with Selena Gomez’s Emilia Pérez win despite Golden Globe win over Wicked
2024 gave the world some rather great and record-breaking movies like Anora, Deadpool & Wolverine, The Substance, and The Apprentice. At the same time, it also gave fans some controversial films like Joker 2. Emilia Pérez has also joined the list of films that failed to impress the audience despite how promising they appeared initially.
As they say, appearances can be deceiving. Such is also the case of Emilia Pérez which follows the story of a Mexican drug cartel leader, Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón) who seeks a lawyer named Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), to help him transition into a woman and start a new life. In the process of doing so, the leader leaves behind his wife and children and later returns as the titular character.
Although the movie is set in Mexico and is said to feature Mexican characters, it was neither filmed in Mexico, nor the actors who played the lead female characters are Mexican-born. To make matters worse, some people have also taken offense with how the trans community is portrayed in the film.
Despite these shortcomings, the movie earned 10 Golden Globe nominations and won 4 out of them. The most disturbing fact is probably that the movie won the Golden Globe award for Best Picture in the Musical or Comedy category against Wicked. Fans have expressed their displeasure about this on X:
The fact that Jacques Audiard, the director of this movie, is French, certainly does not help its case. In fact, it was selected as the French entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards, although the entire movie revolves around Mexican people and their culture.
Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez criticized Selena Gomez’s performance
Selena Gomez plays the role of Manitas’ wife, Jessi Del Monte, who speaks broken Mexican because she was born in the U.S. and moved to Mexico after getting married. The Wolves songstress was nominated for the Golden Globe award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture.
Despite receiving a nomination for such a prestigious award and having been praised by many for her performance, she failed to impress Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez. In a podcast clip (via TikTok), he told co-host Geba Meza that Gomez’s acting is “indefensible”.
Selena is indefensible. I was there [watching the film] with people, and every time a scene came [featuring Gomez], we looked at each other and said, ‘Wow, what is this?
Gomez commented on the TikTok saying that she did the best she could with what she had. This led to Derbez apologizing for his comments in a letter he posted on TikTok. Now, with more and more people joining in on the film’s criticism, it seems as though Derbez was not entirely wrong.
