‘Emilia Pérez’ Wins Golden Globe for Best Picture, Musical or Comedy

Jacques Audiard's trans musical shakes up the Oscar race by beating out "Wicked" for the night's top musical prize.

‘Emilia Pérez’ has won Best Picture — Musical or Comedy at the 2025 Golden Globes.

Jacques Audiard’s musical, which follows a drug cartel member who attempts to exit the organization while simultaneously receiving surgery to live as a trans woman, turned heads when it premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Some critics raved about the film while others were disappointed — but nobody denied the boldness of Audiard’s vision.

“You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a movie musical where the words ‘mammoplasty, vaginoplasty, rhinoplasty’ play out in song. Nor have you lived until you’ve seen that same movie musical in which Selena Gomez says the words ‘My pussy still hurts when I think of you,'” IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio wrote in his Cannes review. “And you’ve never seen a movie musical at all about transness that takes as bold of swings as Jacques Audiard‘s ‘Emilia Pérez,’ which is stylistically unforgettable while missing the crucial element that makes any movie musical work: Actually good, memorable songs.”

The film bolstered its status as an awards frontrunner with additional festival bows in Telluride and Toronto. In addition to Best Picture, the film is expected to contend for Best Original Song and Best Supporting Actress for stars Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldaña.

Speaking to IndieWire in Telluride, Audiard explained that he initially planned to tell the story of ‘Emilia Pérez’ as an opera after making the movie. While those plans were eventually put on hold, he folded his operatic ideas into the film to make it feel even more expressionistic and politically charged.

“The operatic way of thinking led to a certain stylization which is still in the DNA of the project,” Audiard said. “There’s always a social or existential tragedy behind it, which makes it all worthwhile. So you have a country that is falling apart, or you have people that are not well in their own skin. So the musical comedy style helps carry that through musical drama, where singing and dancing do play a role. Because when you write a standard script, you start out, you have a setup, you have a few pages of that, and then the plot moves forward. But when all of a sudden, you have a song that breaks out, within a second, you hit the emotion immediately, you understand the meaning. There’s an efficacy that a standard script would not grant you.”

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