Karla Sofía Gascón’s social-media flameout is burying what should’ve been this year’s prevailing Oscar headline.
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
Growing up, my grandfather had a favorite word, one that somehow sounded just like the disasters, disappointments, and disgraces it described. Malfunctioning appliances, horrible movies, and ugly feats of engineering could all be called una porquería. The word has been on my mind a lot the past few days, as Karla Sofía Gascón’s Oscar campaign for Emilia Pérez has gone up in flames.
In another universe, this year’s historic Oscar nominations would have been the prevailing headline. Gascón is the first trans woman to compete for Best Actress, and for the first time ever, four actors of Latin American descent — Colman Domingo, Fernanda Torres, Zoe Saldaña, and Monica Barbaro — have received simultaneous acting nominations. (Gascón is Spanish and therefore not Latina.) For perspective: Across all of Academy history, only 1.8 percent of all Oscar nominees have been Latina or Hispanic, according to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
At this rate, Latin American representation at the Oscars could hit 5 percent by the time we’ve all perished and the water wars have begun. But we can’t even talk about this remarkable, paradigm-shifting progress because it seems no one bothered to media train a certain lead actress who now seems to be on a one-woman mission to find out how many times she can cancel herself before someone sticks out a long cane, hooks it around her waist, and drags her off the internet.
It all started, as these things so often do, with a less than judicious comment during an interview. Speaking with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, Gascón claimed without evidence that people in Fernanda Torres’s orbit had been disparaging her and Emilia Pérez. To make things even more awkward, Torres (also nominated for Best Actress for I’m Still Here) shared a sweet anecdote about running into Gascón on the campaign trail just days before that newspaper interview.
Gascón later backtracked with a statement in which she called herself “an enormous fan of Fernanda Torres” and said it’s “been wonderful getting to know her over the past few months.” Regarding her comment, she said, “I 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.”
The presumptive war between Emilia Pérez and I’m Still Here precedes Gascón’s comments. Brazilian fans have rallied around I’m Still Here as the two films compete for both Best Picture and Best International Feature Film. Before her tweets resurfaced, the main social-media story in this race was the vitriol Gascón had been receiving online (although certainly not just from Brazilian fans), much of it anti-trans.“I’ve gotten used to it,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in mid-January, pre-scandal. “In fact, I love it. It’s my gasoline to then tell the people of the light: ‘You have won.’ The more people hate me, the more insulting messages they send, the more I say, ‘Thank you,’ and the more I’m going to enjoy this moment.”
But not all of Emilia Pérez’s haters are bigoted. In fact, many of the film’s loudest critics come from the communities it claims to champion. There’s a reason you’re not seeing swaths of trans and Mexican critics mourning the film’s PR debacle. In some ways, Emilia Pérez feels like a parody of a Best Picture nominee — the story of a Mexican trans woman, as written by a Frenchman who admits he conducted little research before making it, and which therefore relies on a spectacle of harmful tropes about both trans people and Mexicans. As critic Drew Burnett Gregory pointed out for Autostraddle, the film hits just about every storytelling banality in the book — from casting trans women as tragic figures and killers to equating transition with death. GLAAD called the movie “profoundly retrograde.” Meanwhile, Mexican moviemakers and critics have been less than thrilled to see the country’s drug war and mass disappearances reduced to fodder for a musical that sincerely tries to humanize a cartel boss who earns her redemption by … starting a NGO. (The vast majority of the film’s cast and crew is, of course, not Mexican.) You can’t call the movie’s critics humorless, though; one of them, Mexican filmmaker Camila Aurora, recently went viral with an incredible parody, the short film Johanne Sacreblu — a Romeo and Juliet riff that documents the travails of a trans baguette that falls in love with a trans croissant.
Days after Gascón’s interview kerfuffle, journalist Sarah Hagi shared screenshots of offensive X posts in which Gascón wrote things (in Spanish) like, “Islam is marvelous, without any machismo. Women are respected, and when they are so respected they are left with a little squared hole on their faces for their eyes to be visible and their mouths, but only if she behaves. Although they dress this way for their own enjoyment. How DEEPLY DISGUSTING OF HUMANITY.” I lack the patience to fastidiously translate all of the posts, but a lot of them are … like that — long, somewhat confusingly written, and, in many cases, Islamophobic enough to land Gascón a writing gig at Real Time With Bill Maher. Interestingly, Torres’s Oscar campaign has also faced a (smaller) dose of scandal: The actress has apologized for wearing blackface in a Brazilian TV comedy sketch 17 years ago.
Representatives for Gascón, Netflix, Torres, and the Academy did not return my request for comment. Gascón has deactivated her X account, but as any good poster knows, there are plenty of other places on the internet to tell on oneself — especially if you’re a public figure. She started with a lengthy Instagram statement.
Encouragingly, the statement’s cover image includes text that reads (in Spanish): “All of us can change for the better. ME AS WELL.” But then, the caption opens with, “THEY ALREADY WON” — a defensive sentiment that recurs later on, when Gascón writes, “They have achieved their objective, to stain, with lies or things taken out of context, my existence.” From there, it’s a song we’ve all heard before: “Anyone who knows” Gascón knows that she is not “a racist,” and in fact, “one of the most important people” in her life is Muslim. In Gascón’s eyes, she has been “condemned” by the public “without trial and without option to explain” her posts’ “true intention.”
“I have always fought for a more just society and for a world of liberty, of peace and of love,” Gascón writes. “I will never support wars, religious extremism or the oppression of races and peoples.”
A good publicist would have told Gascón to end her remarks there. A great one would have taken a pass at that statement before it posted. Instead, Gascón somehow booked herself an interview with CNN Español.
During that interview, Gascón talked for 55 minutes. She cried. According to Deadline, she said she’s been “convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned.” She talked about the 2004 Madrid train bombings, and her daughter, and losing her brother at age 20. She confirmed writing a post that read, “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. They’re all wrong.” But she denied writing another in which she’d purportedly called her co-star Selena Gomez “a rich rat who plays the poor bastard whenever she can and will never stop bothering her ex-boyfriend [Justin Bieber] and his wife [Hailey Bieber].”
According to Gascón, she previously used X like a diary because, back then, barely anyone followed her. She said her posts often included “irony, sarcasm and at times exaggeration and of course I use a resource to talk in third person, if what I wrote was written by someone who thinks in a negative manner.” (Huh?)
Lots of questions come to mind here. Did no one on Netflix’s awards-strategy team look up her social feeds? Or did their brains simply explode when confronted with Spanish? And if Gascón concedes certain tweets are genuine and not others, does that mean some weird corner of the internet is trying to take her down by — [checks notes] — making it look like she bad-mouthed Selena Gomez? Lastly, truly, is anyone looking out for this woman?
At this point, Gascón’s Oscar chances are pretty much shot to hell. According to The Hollywood Reporter, she’s no longer traveling to Los Angeles to promote the film as planned (although she could still participate in awards promotion in Europe), and one of her co-stars, Zoe Saldaña, has distanced herself, saying that Gascón’s posts “saddened” her. Her director, Jacques Audiard, meanwhile, has more vocally disavowed the actress, after attracting controversy of his own for telling an interviewer that Spanish is the language of “the poor and migrants” — another porquería.
A few weeks ago, in the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, it was easy to imagine the Academy crowning Emilia Pérez as Best Picture and patting itself on the back for standing up to xenophobic and anti-trans rhetoric. Now? Who knows. (Not that mid-race controversies have always doomed previous winners: As The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg recently pointed out, plenty have weathered their share of scandals — including A Beautiful Mind, Slumdog Millionaire, The Hurt Locker, The King’s Speech, and, most recently, Green Book.) While accepting a London Film Critics Circle award for Best Supporting Actress on Sunday, Saldaña, who delivered a tearful, prepared speech while accepting a Golden Globe just a month ago, seemed suddenly surprised: “I wasn’t expecting this, and especially now,” she admitted. Meanwhile, Gascón has continued posting.
