With Emilia Pérez's implosion, I'm Still Here is an Oscars frontrunner. Things could be better

Arguably due more to marketing than merit, the Academy Awards' shortlist is still held up as the final word on a given year's film offerings. A sort of silo for the future: Here's what we cared about; here's what defined us. Here is the best art we made, and five, 10, 100 years later, here are the films you should watch to learn about us. 

Unfortunately, 2025 has done a job of bursting that bubble. 

Looking at the best picture nominees, outside of Dune: Part Two's occasional experimentation, there's not much you could point to as groundbreaking. There is Nickel Boys and The Brutalist: your-mileage-may-vary sociopolitical commentaries that, at best, blow the socks off half as many audience members as they put to sleep.

There's Conclave, Wicked and Anora, essentially pleasing popcorn-fare that don't even try particularly hard to fool you into thinking they have something lasting to say. And there's Emilia Pérez and The Substance, movies that fail so spectacularly in both categories they manage to come off as equal parts pretentious and stupid. 

Then there's I'm Still Here, the Brazilian street-level fascism study that sits almost unfortunately outside obvious criticism. 

Follows a real-life story

Directed by Walter Salles, it follows the real-life story of the Paiva family — centring primarily on wife and mother Eunice (Fernanda Torres). Stuck in the ostensibly mundane though truly dangerous military regime of 1970s Brazil, Eunice attempts to build a normal life.

She helps host beach parties by armoured trucks. She exchanges heartfelt notes with an eldest daughter, while casually fretting to her husband the girl might one day be arrested. 

And when her husband — a politician ousted years ago following the deposition — is himself disappeared into the military's murky, secret back rooms, she keeps up appearances.She cooks breakfasts, kisses her children and fights — where she can — to get him back.

As an acting vehicle, it offers enough meat-and-potatoes tragic moments for Torres to catapult herself onto the running for best actress.

And let's get this out of the way: I'm Still Here is a fundamentally solid and rewarding watch that lives and dies by Torres's quiet, fierce performance. But what makes it so appetizing to the Oscars' lineup is also its worst quality: sterility.

Outlining the experience and effects of loss of freedoms with all the urgency of a textbook, the film somehow defies a pressing message, despite what Salles told Time magazine was a coincidental mirroring of current Brazilian politics.

Even given the opportunity to compare democratic freedoms slowly stripped away in plain view with our modern day, it forever pulls itself back into a paint-by-numbers character study. 

It is a dutiful history lesson with the feel of an expertly crafted TV movie. Eunice is given the opportunity to smile sadly, pine after her children, stare heartbreakingly off into the middle distance. These scenes feel like they were dredged up from a million other films, pasted together efficiently if unsurprisingly, and released in 2009. 

Previous successful portrayals

It's not necessarily because of the film's framing: taking an ant's-eye-view of fascism is perhaps the surest way to hammer home its terrifying proximity.The Mortal Storm, from 1940, looked at the value and difficulty of small-scale resistance under Nazi rule, accomplishing almost exactly what I'm Still Here hopes to — though nearly 100 years earlier, and before America even entered that war.

And looking to Central and South America specifically, Brazil's 2007 entry for best foreign language film, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, brought to life the daily threat of persecution in the '70s through the eyes of an abandoned child in a Jewish neighbourhood. 

They are themes also raised in Innocent Voices' juxtaposition of childhood and the Salvadoran civil war, or parents in Machuca, juggling the fallout of Chile's 1973 coup d'état with raising a son: the impossible task of maintaining familial loyalties while resisting the crushing weight of tyranny.

Salles himself has handled elements of this discussion with care in the past. His prior international success, Central Station, examined the economic disaster of post-dictatorship Brazil through a road story of a woman and orphaned young boy she comes to care for. And however imperfectly, it made a very human argument: For however horrifying a country's failure is, humanity survives as long as you protect each other.

It's a skill he hasn't necessarily lost. But it's not just that I'm Still Here inverts that hopeful lilt that hamstrings it. Instead, it has precious little to say, beyond a repeated declaration that the events you see on screen did, indeed, happen. 

We see this play out toward the end: An older Eunice (played now by Fernanda Montenegro, the star of Salles's Central Station and real-life mother to Torres) watches a news broadcast detailing the military regime and its victims. Archival photographs and historical sites are shown as Eunice, looking on in an Alzheimer's-clouded haze, watches them flit by. 

It's her life, shown back to her in a disconnected collage of facts, unfairly robbed of the urgency and importance they held when lived through. The moment is powerful, but is unfortunately too apt at highlighting the film's most major problems.

Still slightly ahead of the rest

That's not to say I'm Still Here is bad — in fact, it's one of the few overtly faultless options among the Oscars' best picture nominees. It sits slightly ahead of the rest of the pack to form what feels like an overall B+ list of also-rans.

But given how Oscars awards campaigns work, that will probably work in its favour. Since Harvey Weinstein pioneered the modern "For Your Consideration" campaign in pitting his Shakespeare in Love against Saving Private Ryan as a sort of David and Goliath story, Academy winners have lived and died by their larger narratives in the media. 

Already, accusations of bad actions intended to help I'm Still Here succeed at the Oscars have been levied at the film's fans — in one case, by none other than Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón.

She has since apologized for implicating Torres directly, but not for claiming that toxic fans co-ordinated with social media teams to inflate Torres's chance at an award.

And given that actress's recent reputational implosion after a series of racist and Islamophobic tweets came to light, I'm Still Here has far fewer obstacles in its way to Academy gold.

For either category, it wouldn't be the worst winner. But for something that barely even stands out of the pack for this year, I'm Still Here doesn't feel like something we'll necessarily need to rewatch, let alone remember.