Selena Gomez Isn’t The Only ‘Emilia Pérez’ Star on a Social Media Break
The Friday Post.
Sometime between when the pool of nominees seems certain, and Oscar night, there is regularly an eleventh-hour revelation that can put one race (A24 putting Paul Schrader in Facebook jail after he said he wanted to hire Kevin Spacey) or the whole show (Kevin Hart getting booted from the host job) into a tailspin. In the last decade or so, it’s the old tweets. It’s always the old tweets! They are always the same weird, smarmy edgelord, generally offensive hot takes. (Before it was the old tweets, the voting season chaos was usually the orchestration of Harvey Weinstein.)
What will happen to the Oscar chances of Emilia Pérez now that star Karla Sofía Gascón’s old tweets have come back to light? (The quality of Emilia Pérez is really not worth discussing here.1) Emilia Pérez is the presumed Best Picture frontrunner; Gascón is the first openly trans performer to be nominated for an Academy Award for acting (quite the shift from an Academy that has previously, and regularly, lauded cis actors for playing trans characters). The messages were resurfaced by the brilliant and intrepid journalist Sarah Hagi on Thursday. “Sorry, is it just my impression or are there more and more Muslims in Spain? Every time I go to pick up my daughter from school there are more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their heels,” Gascón posted on Nov. 23, 2020. “Maybe next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.”
These tweets weren’t from like 2012 or 2014, not that that would excuse them. They are very recent! “I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys Without rights and consider policemen to be assassins,” she posted, per Variety. “They’re all wrong.” As an addendum to that one, she suggested that it was classism, not racism, that divided the public. “Perhaps it is no longer a question of racism, but of social classes that feel threatened by each other. Maybe that’s the only real difference.” This one might actually do more for her Oscar campaign than her performance in Emilia Pérez.
And there are so many messages! She was locked in, a certified poster. Have you seen the one defending Christopher Columbus? Have you seen the one about how Gascón doesn’t understand all the fuss (World War II) over Hitler, who “simply had his opinions about the Jews?” Have you seen the one about Adele’s weight loss, the one about Covid-19 vaccines, the one about Miley Cyrus not deserving Liam Hemsworth? By now you must’ve seen the one about the 93rd Academy Awards, the night Daniel Kaluuya won an Oscar for Judas and the Black Messiah and Yuh-jung Youn won an Oscar for Minari. “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. “Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.”
Gascón made one attempt at an apology on Thursday night, shortly after the Variety report collecting many of the tweets in one place. “I want to acknowledge the conversation around my past social media posts that have caused hurt,” she said initially, in a statement given to The Hollywood Reporter. “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.” It’s too short, too vague, a statement so generally about everything that its meaning is reduced to nothing.
On Friday, when even more of her archive resurfaced, she issued a longer apology via THR. She said it was written through tears. “I’m sorry, but I can no longer allow this campaign of hate and misinformation to affect neither my family nor me anymore, so at their request I am closing my account on X,” she began.
I have 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. I had long ago made the decision to close a social network [sic], which has taken a terrible turn, in which I have also sometimes fallen, and for which I apologize.
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. 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.
I have defended each and every one of the minorities in this world and supported freedom of religion and any action against racism and homophobia in the same way that I have criticized the hypocrisy that underlies them, because the first thing I am critical of is myself.
You will never hear me support a war, an injustice, extremism or applaud anyone who oppresses other human beings.
Perhaps my words are not correct, many times due to ignorance or pure mistake. I apologize again if anyone has ever felt offended or in the future.
I am a human being who also made, makes and will make mistakes from which I will learn. I am not perfect. Taking my words out of context or manipulating them to hurt me is something I am not responsible for.
I am only responsible for what I say, not for what others say I say or what others interpret from what I say.
I hope to have the opportunity to give a more extensive explanation at some point.
Forgive me because I keep going from one side to the other and I cannot be responding to every single thing you bring up to try to sink me.
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.
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.
It is clear that there is something very dark behind it.
But I tell you something: “The more you try to sink me, the stronger it will make me. The greater the victory will be.”
Please forgive me once again if any of my words hurt you.
Sincerely, Karla.
Totally.
Selena Gomez, on her own social media break after posting about ICE arrests on her Instagram, has yet to comment. Gomez didn’t score an Oscar nomination for the movie, but Zoe Saldaña is the presumed frontrunner. “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,” Saldaña said during a Q&A in London, per Variety. “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.”
This year is quite the Conclave; we are all Isabella Rossellini silently cryptic at an outdated copier. I’m Still Here Best Actress nominee Fernanda Torres? Did blackface in 2008. The Brutalist used A.I. technology for Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones’s Hungarian language dialogue, “specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy,” according to director Brady Corbet.2 Anora didn’t use an intimacy coordinator. Have you forgotten Saldaña’s Nina Simone performance? Ethan Slater’s ex-wife, Dr. Lily Jay, wrote a viral Cut essay about losing her husband to his Wicked co-star Ariana Grande. If and when the awards season grim reaper ratatat’s on the door of A Complete Unknown, Club Chalamet will meet him at the door.
What the paid list got this week
Some BTS from my Cosmo profile3 of Brenda Song and Macaulay Culkin:
My Grammys demands (there will be a paywalled chat for the red carpet, and a regular chat for the show)
A Complete Unknown, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 1, Le Bonheur, A Real Pain, Dead Calm, a Challengers event with screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes that I moderated, and more of my Dec/Jan watches.
And in the Substack app: Chats about the newest Traitors and Severance episodes, plus … I can’t explain why I watched all 200 hours of the Rachael Kirkconnell interview on Call Her Daddy, but I did.
More more more
I love how much Reese Witherspoon loves a blind item4: She and a British accent (the best guess is Kate Winslet) fell out over this speech. (Variety)
I guess I should write about this at some point but I don’t know how you look at Justin Baldoni’s strategy right now and see anything other than exactly the same strategy his team discussed at length during the press tour for It Ends With Us. (
Rhode is heading to Sephora, but why did it take so long? “One theory is that it was related to the ‘drama’ around Selena Gomez, once a potential Mrs. Bieber herself. Rare Beauty, after all, is one of Sephora’s most important brands … Another high-level source confirmed that Gomez was definitely the reason for the delay, plus ‘general reticence’ overall with respect to celebrity brands.” (Puck)
“Can you show me what the room looks like now with all the necessary devices plugged in—i.e., the humidifier, night light, sound machine, and monitor? I want to see the room with the cords.” I’ll think about this line every time I scroll through another interiors shoot. (
)“How do I put this? I was screwed.” A bizarre back-and-forth over the auction of an original hat Margaret Hamilton wore as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. (LA Times)
“My aunt Meryl Streep received an order to evacuate on January 8, but when she tried to leave, she discovered that a large tree had fallen over in her driveway, blocking her only exit. Determined to make it out, she borrowed wire cutters from a neighbor, cut a car-size hole in the fence she shared with the neighbors on the other side, and drove through their yard to escape.” (NYMag)
That’s all this week! Thank you for reading. Thank God January is over. Something should be done about January, a month that feels like a year. Will I see you in February at Nitehawk Prospect Park for this screening of Mississippi Masala?
Have a good weekend!
I'll say this: I saw it on election day ... and the somehow day improved from there. At least I was preparing myself for that disappointment!
I wrote about this a little in the comments here, but I'm not that moved by this as a “controversy.” https://hunterharris.substack.com/p/oscar-nominations-challengers-substance-anora
Never forget this iconic Kyle investigation from 2017: https://www.vulture.com/2017/06/what-is-the-worst-script-reese-witherspoon-has-ever-read.html
I'm just laughing so hard at the fact that Netflix clearly put so much money to promote (and possibly bribe 👀) this movie to the top of Oscars convo, but they couldn't pay a fraction of that amount for a PR team to scrub those tweets before the press tour AT LEAST???
“I have defended each and every one of the minorities in this world” MY GOD 😭