The Emilia Perez dynamic is a little more complicated. It certainly has its critics/"elite" who love it; this is part of the Academy's edging towards a chic internationalism by a.) including a lot more international voters in the voting body, and b.) basically scooping up all of the top Cannes winners with near-certainty, which was not a thing to this degree pre-Parasite. But just like your Green Book(s), this has become an Academy movie despite a ton of (but not all) critics also calling it dogshit. This is a growing disconnect because the Academy is now a much larger voting body that spans well outside of Hollywood (while still including it obviously) whose tastes are hard to define while still also group think-y in what they ultimately choose to nominate (the awards conversation for months leading up to actual awards just becomes the template by which things get nominated ... a lot of "uh, I don't know, people said this was good ::smash button::").
But it's also getting hazier to lump "critics" as a single idea, because while they used to be $100,000k salaried middle-aged white people in LA and NY, they are increasingly your underpaid 30-something's who still live on the coasts but are much more mixed-in with the steadily growing cinephile audience on Letterboxd; dumb-as-bricks institutionalist Peter Travers loves it while the guy at Indiewire hates it. and And yes, the Letterboxd crowd largely hate this movie, but I know anecdotally this moving is playing gangbusters with moms who stumble onto it on Netflix in order to catch up with awards movies .... I agree though, whole thing is fucking weird. If you put betting odds on a Jacques Audiard movie, much less a trans mexican cartel musical, being the Oscar frontrunner a year ago (and be one nom short of tying the record with Titanic and All About Eve lol), I would have laughed before betting the farm against it.
The Emilia Perez dynamic is a little more complicated. It certainly has its critics/"elite" who love it; this is part of the Academy's edging towards a chic internationalism by a.) including a lot more international voters in the voting body, and b.) basically scooping up all of the top Cannes winners with near-certainty, which was not a thing to this degree pre-Parasite. But just like your Green Book(s), this has become an Academy movie despite a ton of (but not all) critics also calling it dogshit. This is a growing disconnect because the Academy is now a much larger voting body that spans well outside of Hollywood (while still including it obviously) whose tastes are hard to define while still also group think-y in what they ultimately choose to nominate (the awards conversation for months leading up to actual awards just becomes the template by which things get nominated ... a lot of "uh, I don't know, people said this was good ::smash button::").
But it's also getting hazier to lump "critics" as a single idea, because while they used to be $100,000k salaried middle-aged white people in LA and NY, they are increasingly your underpaid 30-something's who still live on the coasts but are much more mixed-in with the steadily growing cinephile audience on Letterboxd; dumb-as-bricks institutionalist Peter Travers loves it while the guy at Indiewire hates it. and And yes, the Letterboxd crowd largely hate this movie, but I know anecdotally this moving is playing gangbusters with moms who stumble onto it on Netflix in order to catch up with awards movies .... I agree though, whole thing is fucking weird. If you put betting odds on a Jacques Audiard movie, much less a trans mexican cartel musical, being the Oscar frontrunner a year ago (and be one nom short of tying the record with Titanic and All About Eve lol), I would have laughed before betting the farm against it.