By Karl Quinn
Emilia Pérez writer-director Jacques Audiard has disowned his star Karla Sofía Gascón over racist and Islamophobic tweets that have severely dented the film’s Oscars campaign and seen Netflix’s hopes of finally nabbing best picture evaporate like mist on a Los Angeles morn.
Describing the tweets unearthed last week as “inexcusable”, the French filmmaker told Deadline, “I haven’t spoken to her, and I don’t want to”.
Happier times: Emilia Perez cast members Adriana Paz (from left) Edgar Ramirez, Selena Gomez, director Jacques Audiard, Karla Sofia Gascon, and Zoe Saldana win the Golden Globe for best motion picture - musical or comedy.Credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
It was a remarkable disavowal of the actor who has made history as the first openly transgender performer to be nominated. And it gave the starkest insight yet into how much the film’s chances of glory have been damaged by the scandal.
Over at Netflix, meanwhile, Ted Sarandos and co. must wish they could travel back in time to January 24, the day the musical about a Mexican drug cartel boss who transitions from male to female was announced as the frontrunner in this year’s Oscars race with 13 nominations.
Among them were nods for best directing and writing, best actress (Gascón) and supporting actress (Zoe Saldaña), best international picture and, the biggest award of all, best picture.
It is the 10th time the streamer has had a best picture nominee since 2019, when Roma was in the hunt for 10 awards, the same as The Favourite, to which it ultimately lost out.
But while it has twice collected best director (Alfonso Cuarón for Roma and Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog in 2022) and has two wins in the international (formerly foreign language) category (Roma and All Quiet on the Western Front in 2023), a win in the most prized category of all remains elusive.
Now, thanks to the backlash against Emilia Pérez, it is virtually unthinkable that this could be the year that changes.
Emilia Pérez already had its detractors among trans commentators, some of whom saw it as peddling tired and offensive tropes, including “the trans woman killer” and “the tragic trans woman”.
Dubbing it “profoundly retrograde” and “a step backward for trans representation” last November, soon after the movie began streaming on Netflix in North America (in other territories, it has received a wider cinema release), GLAAD rounded up more than a dozen views from trans writers pointing out the problematic ways the film – written and directed by a heterosexual cis-male – dealt with transgender issues.
Some commentators also took offence at its approach to Mexico, pointing out that only one Mexican actor had been cast in a prominent speaking role, the film’s writer-director was French and did not speak Spanish, and the movie was shot in France. Muy autentico? No.
Jacques Audiard fronts a press conference to promote Emilia Perez, in Mexico on January 15, 2025.Credit: Eduardo Verdugo/AP
More recently, concerns about Gascón surfaced when she accused the campaign of fellow Latinx best actress nominee Fernanda Torres, star of I Am Still Here, of bad-mouthing Emilia Perez.
“You will never see me talking negatively about Fernanda Torres or her film,” she said during an interview on Brazilian television last week. “But on the contrary, I do see many people working around Fernanda Torres who talk badly about me and Emilia Pérez.”
While that may have sounded paranoid, the idea that some film publicists might deploy the dark arts to elevate their own film’s chances or to denigrate a rival’s is not as far-fetched as it sounds. And thanks to the ongoing tawdriness of the Justin Baldoni-Blake Lively reputational mud wrestling contest, we have real insight into just how vindictive such campaigns can be.
Zoe Saldaña (left) will be hoping her chances don’t suffer alongside those of Gascón.
So when Gascón’s tweets – issued between 2016 and 2023 – surfaced last week, suspicions were raised that this might be yet another instance of studio politics at play. After all, the overarching raison d’etre of the Oscars is to get people into cinemas, yet Netflix remains steadfastly opposed to anything but the most desultory theatrical releases for its movies (Oscarbait pictures get the necessary one-week season in Los Angeles, rarely more). Granting a best-picture win to the streamer would, in the eyes of many in Hollywood, merely add insult to injury.
But Sarah Hagi, the Canadian journalist and podcaster who found them, insists she found them organically, simply by following her instincts.
“I saw a tweet in which she used the word ‘Islamist’, which I found intense,” she told Variety. “It wasn’t a conspiracy – I do this with many celebrities. I just searched a term, and what I found was shocking.”
What Gascón wrote about George Floyd, whose murder by police in 2020 sparked Black Lives Matter protests, and about Muslims and diversity all served to paint a picture of a woman whose tolerance for others was sadly lacking.
“To highlight someone else’s work, you don’t need to destroy others,” Gascón said during that TV interview.
But to destroy your own, she might have added, you only need to highlight yourself.