Last August, when I first met and interviewed the “Emilia Pérez” star Karla Sofía Gascón, she told me that she was not the type of person to back down from a conflict.
“I’m a great warrior,” Gascón said then. “I love to fight. If it was up to me, I would go to all the talk shows and fight with everybody all the time.”
She shared this to illustrate how fraught her life had become in the years leading up to “Emilia Pérez,” when Gascón, previously known to Mexican audiences for her work in telenovelas, came out publicly as a trans woman. But that hint at her combative nature could also have been considered something of a sneak preview, now that the newly Oscar-nominated actress has become embroiled in a scandal — and embarked on a defiant media blitz — that has imperiled both her career and the formerly front-running awards campaign of “Emilia Pérez.”
As recently as last week, the 52-year-old actress and the Spanish-language musical she stars in were riding high. With a field-leading 13 Oscar nominations, “Emilia Pérez” represented Netflix’s strongest shot at finally nabbing its first best-picture trophy, while Gascón had already made history as the first openly trans actress to be nominated for an Oscar.
Then, last Wednesday, the journalist Sarah Hagi unearthed years-old posts Gascón had written on X that denigrated Muslims (saying Islam was “becoming a hotbed of infection for humanity that urgently needs to be cured”), called George Floyd a “drug-addicted con artist,” and criticized the diverse winners of the 2021 Oscar telecast (“I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8-M”). In a statement issued by Netflix the next day, Gascón apologized for the posts. But instead of allowing the dust to settle, the star took matters into her own hands.
After deactivating her X account, Gascón sent a lengthy and defiant missive to the Hollywood Reporter to inform her detractors, “The more you try to sink me, the stronger it will make me.” In a subsequent interview with CNN En Español that she booked herself, Gascón broke down in tears, claimed that an X post in which she appeared to insult her “Emilia Pérez” co-star Selena Gomez had been doctored, and resolved, “I cannot step down from an Oscar nomination because I have not committed any crime.”
All the while, Gascón has continued to mount a near-daily defense on her Instagram account that has kept the controversy in the headlines. None of her latest moves have been sanctioned by Netflix, and strategists at the streamer must now determine how to salvage an awards campaign that once appeared certain to clinch multiple Oscars.
It’s the latest and most striking example of a trend that became turbocharged this year in which awards strategists who used to influence the race with targeted whisper campaigns have been caught flat-footed by controversies that originate online and quickly get out of hand. Now, Oscar season has become a decentralized free-for-all where social-media sleuths and determined fan armies dig up past gaffes, bad tweets and damaging clips, then amplify them on X, TikTok and awards-adjacent subreddits.
That’s why, in the weeks leading up to the Oscar nominations, “The Brutalist” was pilloried on social media for using an A.I. speech tool to perfect the Hungarian spoken by star Adrien Brody, while “Anora” came under fire for failing to employ an intimacy coordinator. The ascendance of Brazilian best-actress nominee Fernanda Torres further boosted the bedlam, as her fan base on social media went after Gascón for implying that people associated with Torres were “tearing me and ‘Emilia Pérez’ down.” Days later, it was Torres who had to apologize when online Oscar obsessives resurfaced a 2008 clip of her performing in blackface on a Brazilian comedy show.
Not all of these social-media controversies make their way to the very offline world that most Oscar voters tend to inhabit. In the past, contenders like “Green Book” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” faced online opprobrium for their handling of racial issues and still won multiple Oscars. And though “Emilia Pérez” had been lambasted online since last year for its indelicate staging of trans issues and Mexican culture, very little of that had been on the radar of Oscar voters, who largely consider the movie to be bold and progressive.
Still, the Gascón fiasco has been unavoidable, according to many of the academy members and industry figures I spoke to over the last week. Liberal Oscar voters who were inclined to support the trans-empowerment narrative of “Emilia Pérez” as a rebuke to President Trump may now find that mission complicated by Gascón’s old tweets, especially after the industry trade Variety ran a recent editorial about Gascón’s press blitz that deemed the intractable actress the “Donald Trump of Oscar season.”
So what happens to the “Emilia Pérez” campaign now, with less than a month to go until the Oscar ceremony on March 2? In the short-term, Netflix has begun to refocus its campaign around Gascón’s co-star Zoe Saldaña, an industry favorite who is considered a strong contender for the supporting-actress Oscar. But the extent to which this has affected the film’s best-picture chances will remain unclear for a while.
For example, voting on this Saturday’s Producers Guild Awards — often considered the strongest best-picture bellwether — was nearly closed before the “Emilia Pérez” controversy ramped up. And European voters, who are often more willing to overlook scandal than their American counterparts, may still turn out for “Emilia Pérez” at the upcoming BAFTA and César Awards later this month.
I have heard that for the time being, Gascón will focus on those European awards ceremonies and skip the two stateside shows she had been slated to appear at this weekend, the Critics Choice Awards on Friday (where she is a best-actress nominee) and the Producers Guild Awards on Saturday (which had originally booked her as a presenter). Whether she will attend the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Feb. 23 or the Oscar ceremony next month is yet to be determined, though Netflix will no longer cover expenses for the Spain-based star to make those trips to Los Angeles.
No matter the ultimate outcome, this controversy will surely change the way awards campaigns are waged going forward. Many in the industry were surprised that Netflix strategists and Gascón’s own publicists had failed to persuade her to scrub her old social-media posts before the Oscar bid exposed her to a new level of global scrutiny. You can expect that sort of across-the-board purge to be a campaign mainstay in the future.
In the meantime, Oscar strategists will have to account for their own blind spots. One hopes Gascón eventually will, too. When I interviewed her last August, those blind spots came up as she spoke passionately about the case of the Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, whose eligibility had been questioned by the likes of J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author.
“It’s always the same story of these same people trying to find a new victim to generate more hate,” Gascón said. “It’s a constant element in human history. Before, it was people of color or women or workers. Now, it’s trans people.”
Her voice rose. “And even me, maybe without even knowing it, I have some prejudice or I criticize some communities because we all do it,” Gascón said.
