When looking for a petri dish in which to develop philosophical arguments, I don’t automatically turn to the annual media awards season, but this year these awards are proving to be a fertile breeding ground. I thought we might ponder a few questions together.

Is it theoretically possible for an actor to win the award for best actor and best actress for the same film? As you probably know, unless you have been on a space station for the last couple of months, the musical (if that’s the word I’m looking for) Emilia Pérez has been taking the movie world by storm. It has so far garnered 87 wins and 225 nominations.

(There is an entire blog to be written exploring the reasons why it has attracted this almost record-equalling amount of recognition. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that no small part of this is the motion picture industry raising its collective middle finger to the 47^th president of the United States.)

The 87 awards include the following wins: Cannes Jury Prize; European Film award for best actress and best director; Satellite award for best original score; Cannes Film Festival award for best actress (won jointly by four people – in what universe does that make sense?); Golden Globe award for best foreign language film. The film has also been nominated for 13 Oscars, including best picture, best director and best actress.

It has also garnered more outraged attention than any other film this season. It raises questions about the ‘appropriation’ by outsiders of another culture’s concerns and issues. The French director Jaques Audiard freely admits that he had no interest in making the film ‘realistic’ in its cultural depictions. Many Mexicans are apparently up in arms about the perceived ‘shallowness’ of the film’s handling of the problems of drug cartel violence and the mass disappearance of citizens, as well as about the Mexican accents.

My personal outrage is reserved more for the staggering and laughable inanity of one of the non-Spanish language songs in the film. (Thanks to my good friend for pointing me towards this song.) If you haven’t yet seen the clip featuring the song Vaginoplasty, I recommend you pour yourself a stiff drink, sit down, and watch this excerpt. Before you do, let me give you the plot background. The female singer is a lawyer who has been hired by a Mexican drug cartel lord to discreetly arrange for him to transition to a woman, which will enable him both to ‘disappear’ and to finally become his (her) true self. Now you are as ready as I can make you for the song. Off you go. I’ll wait here for you.

It’s difficult to single out one element for particular attention here, given that the tune sounds like something my five-year-old grandson just improvised and the staging makes no sense at all. But I think, after watching it, you will agree that the lyric deserves a special mention, being both fatuous and repetitive, in addition to not answering the ostensible dramatic trigger for the song (the lawyer learns neither the risks involved in the transition surgery process nor the time needed) and neither scanning nor rhyming.

Blogger’s Note: For reasons that will become clear, in the following paragraphs, I follow the practice that became common in the 2000s, of using ‘actor’ as a gender-neutral term applicable to thespians of both sexes.

So, our first philosophical question is this. Suppose there is a remake of Emilia Pérez whose pre-transition scenes are filmed with a male actor playing the part of the drug lord, and whose post-transition scenes are filmed with the same actor, after the actor has, in real life, transitioned to a female. Is it theoretically possible for this actor to be nominated for both the best actor and the best actress awards? If the actor wins both awards, is the best actor Oscar considered to have been awarded posthumously, or can the actor themself collect it? (Asking for a friend.)

Speaking of raising the dead, the Grammy award ceremony just took place, and featured another interesting philosophical question. Winner of the Best Rock Performance was Now and Then, a song written by John Lennon and featuring The Beatles. Our philosophical question is: What constitutes a performance in the arts?

Again, for those who’ve been on the space station, here’s the back story. John Lennon wrote Now and Then, and recorded it as a solo home demo, in 1977. After his death in 1980, the song was considered as a ‘reunion’ single for the 1995-6 retrospective project The Beatles Anthology. George Harrison added some guitar tracks and overdubs as part of this. However, production difficulties proved too great, and the idea was shelved. In 2021 (20 years after George Harrison died), Peter Jackson commissioned machine-learning-assisted audio restoration technology for his documentary The Beatles: Get Back. This technology enabled extraction of Lennon’s voice from the 1977 demo, with a result that was of sufficiently high quality to make it possible to build a recording of Now and Then around it, with additional lyrics by Paul McCartney, featuring contributions on guitar, drum and vocals by Ringo Starr and a beautiful(?) creepy(?) eerie(?) evocative(?) video. You can watch and hear it here.

This ‘assemblage’ has now been awarded Performance of the Year by the Grammys. If one of the performers recorded his contribution over 47 years ago, another added his contribution 30 years ago, and only the other two were performing while hearing, and, in some sense, feeding off, the contributions of John and George, is that, technically, a ‘performance, by The Beatles’? Is the voice of John that we hear on the recording actually John’s voice? Is it less John’s voice than any recording of a singer is that singer’s voice? Does any of this matter?

Which brings us neatly back to this year’s Oscars. Another contender for best film is The Brutalist, a biopic of a fictional Hungarian Jewish architect who emigrates to the USA after the Shoah. It was recently revealed that, for sequences in which the film’s leading actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones speak Hungarian, the film’s editor (himself Hungarian-born) used AI software produced by a company called Respeecher to tweak the actors’ vowel sounds, making them sound convincingly Hungarian.

The outrage this has generated appears to be because the filmmakers were not up-front about this tweak. In films in which similar techniques have been used openly, no such outrage has resulted. In the case of The Brutalist, there has been debate about whether the leading actors should now be eligible for acting Oscars. (Brody and Jones have been nominated for best actor and best supporting actress, respectively. [Blogger’s note: I was going to write “respectively, obviously”, but, in the light of this week’s first story, not as much can be taken foir granted as used to be the case.)

There is a philosophical debate to be had here about the particular point, if any, at which such tweaking of a performance makes the actor ineligible. Suppose Hugh Grant’s voice were to be digitally manipulated to simulate a perfect Lower East Side accent for a role. Suppose 5’ 6” (168 cm) -tall Alan Ladd were given an orange crate to stand on for close-up scenes with his leading lady, or a trench were dug for her to stand in (as, apparently, happened). Suppose all of Matt Damon’s stunts in the Bourne films were performed by a double. Suppose each of an actor’s scenes in a particular film were spliced together in the editing room from hundreds of different takes of each scene. Suppose an actor’s physical appearance on screen were digitally manipulated, to express emotion or to convey complexity through body-language. Is there a point at which such manipulation renders it meaningless to talk about the actor’s performance, or, at every point in the development of cinema, does whatever is technically possible become acceptable?

At this point, I should probably make it clear that, this week at least, I offer questions rather than answers. I’m really not sure where I stand on any of this, but I strongly suspect that these are discussions we will increasingly be having, as technology develops.

All I know for sure is that, based on Karla Sofía Gascón’s appearance and demeanour at the Golden Globes, I found excellent her/his/their portrayal of a woman in the brief clips I have seen from Emilia Pérez after the drug lord undergoes surgery. But that’s really another story.