When the Oscar nominations were announced on January 23, there was much for the creators and producers of Emilia Pérez to crow about. The Netflix-produced left-of-centre “crime opera”, directed by French director Jacques Audiard and starring Zoe Saldana and Spanish trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón, received 13 nominations, including best picture, director, leading actress for Gascón and supporting actress for Saldana, breaking records for the most nominations for a non-English language.
It also heralded a major Oscar first when Gascón became the first trans person to be nominated in the awards’ history. Netflix, Audiard and his cast and crew had plenty to celebrate, and normally at this point in the Hollywood awards calendar, they’d be seen drinking champagne and laughing on the red carpets and at the glamorous lunches that fill the weeks leading up to the announcement of the Oscars on March 3.
Instead, the film, which is obviously the right-wing Republican crowd’s worst woke nightmare, has been mired in controversy around comments made several years ago online by Gascón that have shocked many with their bigotry and callousness. The comments, which were posted on X in 2020, called George Floyd, the man whose murder by police caused protests around the world, “a drug addict and a hustler”. They also included derogatory comments about Muslim women and suggested a ban on Islam as a religion, which went against “European values and [violated] human rights”.
In 2021 Gascón also took aim at the Oscars, tweeting that “more and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films. I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival [or a] Black Lives Matter demonstration”.
The posts, which began to appear on Thursday, were deleted by Gascón soon after stories began to spread on social media, but the damage to the actress’s Oscar campaign seems to have been done. Gascón apologised for the comments last week in a statement in which she also said that she was closing her account on X after having “been threatened with death, insulted, abused and harassed to the point of exhaustion. I have a wonderful daughter to protect, whom I love madly and who supports me in everything.”
It wasn’t the first controversy surrounding Gascón, who had stirred the internet into a frenzy soon after the Oscar nominations announcement with claims that the social media team for Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres (who is nominated for best actress for her work in the film I’m Still Here) were running a campaign online to smear Gascón and the Emilia Pérez team.
The upshot of all of this has been an outcry from liberal Hollywood at what it perceives as the anti-liberal past comments of the star of a film that’s supposed to be the great hope for liberals and trans supporters in the wake of the re-election of Donald Trump and the anti-transgender measures almost immediately imposed by his administration.
Audiard came out this week to distance himself from his star and her comments. The rest of the cast and crew, and producers Netflix, are working furiously to ensure that if Gascón’s campaign fails, which looks likely, she won’t be taking the rest of the film’s team down with her.
Netflix, in spite of several strong nominations over the years, has never won a best picture Oscar, and Audiard’s film offers the streamer perhaps its best chance, leading to a distinct iciness on the company’s part towards Gascón. While the rest of the Emilia Pérez cast and crew will be seen at upcoming awards ceremonies and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences luncheons, most of Gascón’s appearances have been cancelled, with some fellow nominees informing the Academy that their appearances at these functions are conditional on her absence.
The consequences for Gascón could, however, be greater than just a failure to win the best actress award in a tight race. As The Hollywood Reporter’s Oscars expert, Scott Feinberg, wrote this week, it’s also possible that the actress’s hopes for a productive and lucrative future after Emilia Pérez have also been extinguished. Gascón may only have herself to blame for these setbacks but there’s the bigger question of whether she might also be to blame if the controversy affects the chances of everyone else involved in the film. As Feinberg noted, “Based on my conversations in recent days with Academy members, many are going to have a hard time voting for Emilia Pérez in any category, given that Emilia Pérez herself has become toxic.”
If one looks at the records of previous best picture nominees that were caught up in controversy before the Oscar announcement and went on to win, there is still a chance that Emilia Pérez may come out on top come Oscar night. Accusations of anti-Semitism against John Nash, the subject of A Beautiful Mind played by Russell Crowe, didn’t stop that film from winning the coveted award, while allegations of the exploitation of its child actors couldn’t stop Slumdog Millionaire. Claims that The King’s Speech was riddled with historical inaccuracies didn’t prevent it from winning best picture either.
However, while these past examples may allow the Emilia Pérez team to remain cautiously optimistic, there is something about this controversy that, as Feinberg believes, “feels different ... because her bad behaviour is undeniable ... indefensible (is there an ethnic group that she didn’t offend?) and completely contrary to what she and her movie are supposed to be about (namely, tolerance). Moreover, she has undermined the efforts of a lot of people who worked tirelessly on her behalf.”
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