Think back to that hokey trope from vintage war films. One of the squad is seriously wounded. He slumps into the mud and urges his comrades onwards. “Leave me behind. I’ll only slow you down,” the poor man barely croaks. Of course, the rest do no such thing. Gregory Peck (or whoever) hoists bloodied Montgomery Clift (sounds about right) onto his shoulder and they all move heroically forward.
To be clear, this is absolutely not what is happening with maimed Karla Sofía Gascón, Oscar-nominated in the best actress category for Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, and Netflix, the film’s distributor, in an awards season of unusual toxicity. Anne Thompson, among the wisest of Hollywood observers, put it well in an article for IndieWire. “Netflix’s current mission: save the Oscar wins they can, separate their remaining contenders from Gascón,” she wrote. And Gascón, ostracised after a journalist unearthed a stream of offensive tweets the actor had posted over several years, is not peacefully slumping into a fatal heap. “I cannot renounce a nomination either because I have not committed any crime nor have I harmed anyone,” she said in the aftermath of the revelations.
Nobody can remember a pre-Oscar scandal quite like the one that broke last Thursday. Audiard’s film, tale of a Mexican drug lord who undergoes gender-affirming surgery, had (as we will see later) its share of detractors, but that backlash has not hitherto impeded a triumphant run through awards season. It took a whopping five gongs at the European Film Awards. It also topped the table at the Golden Globes, winning four prizes, including best comedy or musical. Its eventual 13 Oscar nominations put it one behind the all-time record jointly held by All About Eve, Titanic and La La Land. If, as was the case until recently, there were still two awards for sound and Selena Gomez had snuck into best supporting actress (she was probably in sixth place), then Emilia Pérez could well have taken the record all on its own. Gascón became the first ever transgender actor to receive a nomination.
The run had begun at the Cannes film festival last May. I remember trundling out of the Bazin Theatre with a well-known English critic and nodding my qualified approval. A few reaches too far. Some questionable swerves. But, all round, an entertainingly brash romp that may scrabble two or three Oscar nods. Reasonable objections soon emerged from Latino observers, who questioned the right of French, Spanish and American filmmakers to tackle the most sensitive of Mexican malaises, and from the transgender community, many of whom felt the representation glib and offensive.
“We told you so,” Giancarlo Sopo, again in IndieWire, wrote when last week’s story landed. “Latinos knew that Emilia Pérez ... was a disaster waiting to happen.” Well, maybe. But, to be accurate, nobody predicted that this particular disaster was about to hit.
On January 30th, Sarah Hagi, a journalist based in Canada, posted four screenshots on X with an exasperated message. “it’s so insane that karla sofía gascón still has these tweets up. straight up have never seen tweets this racist from someone actively campaigning to win an ACADEMY AWARD,” she wrote, noting she had found more than a dozen other similar messages. The screenshotted tweets came with translations from Gascón’s native Spanish. “How many more times will history have to expel the Moors from Spain,” one read. Elsewhere she identified “Islam” as a “hotbed of infection for humanity”. George Floyd, whose death at the hand of police spurred the Black Lives Matter movement, was described as a “drug addict swindler”. Observing the 2021 Oscars, at which black-British actor Daniel Kaluuya and Korean performer Yuh-jung Youn took the supporting awards, Gascón wondered if she was watching “an Afro-Korean festival”.
The tweets were soon deleted. Then the whole account went. Gascón issued a boilerplate, crisis-management apology. Long-term Oscar observers expected the offender to then remain largely silent beneath sackcloth and ashes, but, it transpired, that wasn’t her way. A subsequent Instagram post (she hadn’t deleted that account) argued “they” had positioned “things that I wrote to glorify as if they were criticisms, jokes as if they were reality”. She was at it again on telly a few days later.
The recriminations will reverberate around the military-awards complex for years to come. Nobody has yet found a satisfactory answer as to why Netflix, which acquired the film at Cannes a full nine months ago, had not scoured the actor’s social media accounts. The scandal managed to muffle less heated controversies around other films competing for best picture. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist had used the faintest whispers of AI technology at its outer edges? Sean Baker did not employ intimacy co-ordinators on Anora? Fernanda Torres, star of I’m Not There, had appeared in blackface for a sketch in her native Brazil? None of this was quite so tasty as a stream of offensive tweets from the star of a film that – once touted for its “progressive” attitudes – was already under fire from several directions.
Within a few days, Netflix was distancing itself. A “for your consideration” advertisement, aimed at Academy voters, made no mention of Gascón whatsoever. Variety claimed that “Netflix and the PR agency have stopped talking directly with Gascón”. The trade paper further quoted “sources” as saying “the streamer is no longer covering expenses for her travel to the various awards shows or her styling for any appearances at these events”.
She looks to have been cut adrift, but, as far as awards hopes go, Gascón will probably not be the one who suffers. By last week she was already no better than fourth favourite (out of five nominees) for best actress. That race seemed to be between Demi Moore for The Substance, Mikey Madison for Anora and the fast-rising Torres for I’m Still Here. The question is whether the scandal will – in an obverse of the halo effect – retard Zoë Saldaña’s hopes in best supporting actress. That would hardly be fair. She once seemed unbeatable, but Ariana Grande, strong in Wicked, may now see a path to victory. Emilia Pérez is surely sliding in the best picture race as The Brutalist weathers the AI storm and Anora shakes off that intimacy co-ordinator awkwardness. Could pope-picking thriller Conclave or biopic A Complete Unknown, neither yet slurred, slip through the middle? Possibly.
The threat of I’m Still Here, a sprawling political drama, sneaking past Emilia Pérez in best international film – still its safest category – does open up the possibility of Audiard claiming one of Oscar’s most unhappy records. The title for most nominations with no wins is held jointly by Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple and Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point with 11 unconverted nods. Thirteen is the kind of number that might never be beaten. Though I’m not quite predicting that yet.
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