International correspondent

After failing to submit “Anatomy of a Fall” as an official entry, France’s revamped Oscar committee has a lot at stake to avoid missing another opportunity to give the country its first Oscar win for Best International Film in more than three decades. But don’t expect the French to make the obvious choice.

On paper, Jacques Audiard’s thrilling redemption thriller “Emilia Perez,” which won two major awards at the Cannes Film Festival and received rave reviews, is a sure bet. Audiard is a respected French auteur who won a Palme d’Or for “Dheepan,” was previously nominated for a foreign-language Oscar for “A Prophet,” and has an international reputation. “Emilia Perez,” starring Karla Sofía Gascón as a fearsome drug lord who embraces his true self as a woman, struck a chord at Cannes, earning one of the year’s longest standing ovations. The Spanish-language film went on to win the Jury Prize (chaired by Greta Gerwig) as well as a Best Actress award for the ensemble cast, which included Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz.

But another contender, “The Count of Monte Cristo,” a sweeping three-hour epic adventure based on the Alexandre Dumas classic, is also being discussed as a potentially strong candidate to represent France in the international feature film race. The directors, Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière, don’t have Audiard’s prestigious pedigree, but they are still respected in France, having written the two-part saga “The Three Musketeers.”