So What’s Happening With Emilia Pérez’s Oscar Chances Right Now?
The Friday Post.
There will be a Super Bowl chat on Sunday! And a Critics Choice Awards chat tonight if you’re watching. (I won’t be able to.) Like Lady Gaga investigating the insurrection, I will be going to DC this month! You can hear Peyton and I speak at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on Wednesday.
In the week since the journalist Sarah Hagi uncovered not-that-old tweets of Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón expressing views that are Islamophobic, anti-black, and outright cruel, Gascón has remained on somewhat of a social media break. Unfortunately, she has not been on a talking break. She’s offered a spree of defiant statements, most of them non-apology apologies.
Gascón is no longer being advised by Netflix, which distributed Emilia Pérez, or her publicity firm (which she shares with her Emilia Pérez co-star Zoe Saldana). Voting for the SAG and Critic’s Choice awards closed before Gascón’s tweets came to light. What will happen before Oscar voting begins on Tuesday, February 11? Here’s a timeline of what you might’ve missed:
January 21: In a January 21 video interview with Folha de S. Paulo, a Brazilian daily newspaper, Gascón praised fellow Best Actress contender Fernanda Torres (I’m Still Here) but complained about the online discourse around her role that she attributed to Torres’s team. “What I don’t like are social media teams — people who work with these people — trying to diminish our work, like me and my movie, because that doesn’t lead anywhere,” Gascón said. “You don’t need to tear down someone’s work to highlight another’s. I have never, at any point, said anything bad about Fernanda Torres or her movie. However, there are people working with Fernanda Torres tearing me and ‘Emilia Pérez’ down. That speaks more about their movie than mine.”
In a clarification to Variety, Gascón said that she “was referencing the toxicity and violent hate speech on social media that I sadly continue to experience. Fernanda has been a wonderful ally, and no one directly associated with her has been anything but supportive and hugely generous.” Her comments did not violate Academy guidelines, according to Variety, because “she does not make disparaging remarks about Torres’ performance, which would have broken Academy rules. Quite the opposite, Gascón praises her fellow nominee as an actress.”
January 23: The Oscar nominations are announced. Emilia Pérez received the most nominations with 13: Best Picture, Best Director, Actress in a Leading Role, Actress in a Supporting Role, Adapted Screenplay, Makeup and Hairstyling, Cinematography, Film Editing, Original Score, Sound, two nominations for Original Song, and International Feature Film.
January 30: Sarah Hagi posts a spate of Gascón’s tweets, shared between 2016 and 2023. “Islam is becoming a hotbed of infection for humanity that urgently needs to be cured,” Gascón wrote in 2016, per Hagi. “How many more times will history have to expel the Moors from Spain… we have not yet realized what this threat of civilizations means, which constantly attacks the freedom and coherence of the individual. It’s not about racism, it’s about Islam,” Gascón wrote in another tweet posted in 2016.
After Hagi’s tweet went viral, Variety found even more. “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, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M,” Gascón wrote, presumably about the 93rd Academy Awards in April 25, 2021 (where Daniel Kaluuya and Youn Yuh-Jung both won), per Variety. “Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.” Another, from August 2020, per Variety: “The Chinese vaccine, apart from the mandatory chip, comes with two spring rolls, a cat that moves its hand, 2 plastic flowers, a pop-up lantern, 3 telephone lines and one euro for your first controlled purchase.”1
Later on January 30, Gascón issued the first (of many) statements addressing the tweets. “I want to acknowledge the conversation around my past social media posts that have caused hurt,” she said in a statement to Variety. “As someone in a marginalized community, I know this suffering all too well and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain. All my life I have fought for a better world. I believe light will always triumph over darkness.”
January 31: Gascón deleted her Twitter account sometime before the early morning, per Variety. She issued a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, which she said she wrote through tears. “As part of this society, I have expressed my disagreement or agreement with all the related issues that have touched me and of which I have had an opinion, often erroneous, which has changed throughout my own experience,” she wrote. “I have always used my social media as a diary, reflections or notes, to later create stories or characters, not as something that would be scrutinized down to the last of its 140 characters, since sometimes I, myself, am not even aware of having written something negative.”
Another highlight that seems to express indignation over contrition: “But if you want, you can continue attacking me as if I were responsible for hunger and wars in the world. I apologize again if I have ever offended anyone with my words in my life,” she continued. “I am only Karla Sofía Gascón, an actress who has reached where very few have thanks to her effort and work, without stealing or harming anyone in this world, just trying to get them to let me live in peace, love and respect, something that seems to bother a lot of people in this world.”
Zoe Saldaña addressed Gascón’s tweets. “I’m still processing everything that has transpired in the last couple of days, and I’m sad. It makes me really sad because I don’t support [it], and I don’t have any tolerance for any negative rhetoric towards people of any group,” the Best Supporting Actress nominee said during a Q&A in London. “I can only attest to the experience that I had with each and every individual that was a part, that is a part, of this film, and my experience and my interactions with them was about inclusivity and collaboration and racial, cultural, and gender equity. And it just saddens me. It saddens me that we are having to face this setback right now.”
February 1: “I recognize, among tears, that they have already won, they have achieved their goal, stain, with lies or things taken out of context my existence,” Gascón wrote on her personal Instagram. “Anyone who knows me knows I'm not racist (they'll be surprised when they find out that one of the most important people in my current life and that I love most is Muslim)” — definitely something that, um, helps her case here — “nor any of the things I've been judged and convicted for without judgment and no option to explain his true intention; I have always fought for a more just society and a world of freedom, peace and love. I will never support wars, religious extremism or oppression of races and peoples.”
February 2: Gascón sat for an hour-long interview with CNN en Espanol, at turns defensive and emotional. She said that a tweet attrituted to her calling her co-star Selena Gomez a “rich rat” was fabricated, and insisted that Gomez and Zoe Saldaña support her “200%.”
Gascón also claims that the resurfaced tweets are the result of a targeted harassment campaign against her. She is harmless, she argues, and the tweets were taken out of context. “What have I done in my life? What have I done? I haven’t killed a single fly. When I have a spider in my house I put a little glass on it so as not to kill it and take it out to the street.”
February 3: “Tensions are said to be high between Gascón and [Emilia Pérez distributor Netflix], which has invested millions in the film’s awards push,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. “The two parties are now said to be communicating only through Gascón’s agent, Jeremy Barber of UTA. And it is my understanding that there is no great interest on the part of Netflix to provide the usual courtesies afforded by a studio to an Oscar contender, such as transportation and accommodations, to facilitate her attendance at the remaining awards season gatherings.” The report says Gascón has already been removed from Emilia Pérez promo materials.
A damning Variety headline from the trade’s chief correspondent Daniel D'Addario: “Karla Sofía Gascón’s Off-the-Rails Reaction to Twitter Controversy Has Made Her the Donald Trump of Oscar Season.” If Oscar voters were excited to cast their vote for a movie that at least seems progressive (and with a historical Oscar nomination for Gascón), they’ve instead been faced with a “candidate who seemingly refuses to listen to advice from advisers, offers long-winded and nonsensical explanations for bad behavior, and paints herself as the victim of unnamed conspiracy looks very familiar.” Sebastian Stan actually got an award for playing that familiar figure…
Another defiant statement from Gascón, via her Instagram: “They have literally translated everything without wanting to understand the background and have created other fake tweets, putting everything together in a block to magnify it. No one has asked me for the meaning or bothered to check in response to what news and what horrible comments people made and to whom it actually responds to,” she wrote. “I will never ask for forgiveness because it's a lie, and you who know me have judged me without asking and without a choice to defend me.”
February 4: Who’s afraid of little old she? Gascón issues another statement via her Instagram. “Been on a rollercoaster of emotions these past few days. I have been transparent because I have nothing to hide. During that time, I felt lost in my transition, seeking approval in the eyes of others. But today, I finally know who I am,” she wrote. (She began transitioning in 2018, and was cast in Emilia Pérez in 2022.) “I only seek the freedom to exist without fear, to create art without barriers and to move forward with my new life. They want to apply the ‘cancel culture.’ I ask the experts in Hollywood, the journalists who know me and have followed my path, how to move forward?”
That same day, Variety learns that the Oscars will no longer use the beloved (by me) “Fab 5” presentation style where five previous acting winners personally praise the performances of the category’s five nominees. “The decision came before the official nominations were announced,” the trade reported, noting that it will happen only in the director’s category and artisan awards. “One issue that the Oscars were grappling with was that the broadcast would have run out of past winners if it became an annual tradition, forcing it to recycle the same presenters.”
February 5: Emilia Pérez director and co-writer Jacques Audiard told Deadline that he’s no longer speaking to his movie’s star. “I haven’t spoken to [Gascón], and I don’t want to. She is in a self-destructive approach that I can’t interfere in, and I really don’t understand why she’s continuing. Why is she harming herself? Why? I don’t understand it, and what I don’t understand about this too is why she’s harming people who were very close to her,” he said. “I’m thinking in this thing of how hurting others, of how she’s hurting the crew and all these people who worked so incredibly hard on this film. I’m thinking of myself, I’m thinking of Zoe [Saldaña] and Selena [Gomez]. I just don’t understand why she’s continuing to harm us. I’m not getting in touch with her because right now she needs space to reflect and take accountability for her actions.”
Audiard said that Gascón was playing the victim. “She’s talking about herself as a victim, which is surprising,” he continued. “It’s as if she thought that words don’t hurt.” (I wonder when Audiard, who said that “Spanish is a language of modest countries, of developing countries, of the poor and migrants,” came to the conclusion that words are hurtful.)
In a new interview with a Variety podcast, Saldaña reiterated her disappointment. “I’m sad. Time and time again, that’s the word because that is the sentiment that has been living in my chest since everything happened,” Saldaña said. “I’m also disappointed. I can’t speak for other people’s actions. All I can attest to is my experience, and never in a million years did I ever believe that we would be here.” She reportedly gave “a long blink” before answering the question about the Gascón imbroglio.
Also on February 6, the writer John Paul Brammer posted his review of Emilia Pérez. This has nothing to do with Gascón, really, but JP is a terrific writer and I was happy to read his opinion. “Emilia Pérez has been called many things: Offensive. Misguided. Overrated. Regressive queer representation. An inaccurate portrayal of Mexican culture. Musically unpleasant. Bad at Spanish. Honestly, it sounds a lot like me. I thought perhaps I would feel represented by it. The film having so many haters only intrigued me more. It brings me great joy to love something that everyone hates, and vice versa. There is a malevolence so ancient and terrible in me. Now that I’ve seen it, it gives me no pleasure to say that the haters were right. Huge victory for the haters here. Emilia Pérez is not good.”
February 6: The book publisher Dos Bigotes announced that they have canceled the March 17 release of a revised version of Gascón’s 2018 memoir “Karsia: An Extraordinary Story,” per Variety.
Gascón says that she will remain mum on the movie and her tweets. Via her post on IG: “Following Jacques interview that I understand, I decided, for the film, for Jacques, for the cast, for the incredible crew who deserves it, for the beautiful adventure we all had together, to let the work talk for itself, hoping my silence will allow the film to be appreciated for what it is, a beautiful ode to love and difference. I sincerely apologize to everyone who has been hurt along the way.”
For more on Emilia Perez:
Sarah Hagi was on “Lemme Say This” dispelling the Crazy Days and Nights2 rumor that she found Karla Sofía Gascón’s tweets because she is close personal friends with Demi Moore.3 (Lemme Say This)
A clear-eyed assessment
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