When Emilia Pérez stars Karla Sofia Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz won a shared Best Actress prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, jury president Greta Gerwig said it was the film’s theme of sisterhood that she wanted to celebrate. “Women together — that’s something we wanted to honor when we made this award,” Gerwig said. “Each of them is a standout, but together [they’re] transcendent.”

Little did anyone know at the time, but Gerwig was the first prominent Hollywood name to lavish praise on Jacques Audiard’s genre-breaking musical about a drug cartel leader who undergoes gender-confirmation surgery so that she can live as her authentic self. In the eight months since the Cannes debut, as Netflix has moved Emilia Pérez through the fall festival gauntlet and into position as one of the year’s top Oscar contenders, several top industry figures and international voting...