Gascon’s past posts damage Netflix’s ‘Emilia Perez’ Oscar hopes
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Controversies affect multiple Oscar-nominated films this year
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Oscar campaigns often involve personal and professional controversies
By Dawn Chmielewski
Netflix’s expedients for claiming an Academy Award for stylish picture appear to have dissolved after a series of disturbing social media posts resurfaced.
The kidney- bending musical crime drama “ Emilia Perez ” looked like the streaming service’s strongest shot yet at best picture after winning the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and garnering a aggregate of 13 Academy Award nominations.
But prospects for the movie bedimmed after a intelligencer set up and restated a series of Spanish- language posts, dating from 2016 through 2020. In them, the film’s Spanish star, Karla Sofia Gascon, described Islam as a “ seedbed of infection for humanity ” and George Floyd as a “ medicine addict swindler. ” Social media amplified the story to global proportions.
Gascon apologized, but the damage was done.
“ This is the time of notoriety principally lighting themself on fire and taking their own movie down with them, ” said expert marketing superintendent Terry Press, who has worked on Oscar juggernauts on behalf of directors Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and other Hollywood lights.
Gascon faded from the Hollywood awards circuit, though she has said she’ll attend the Oscars form on Sunday.
Netflix did n’t incontinently respond to a request for comment.
putatively every film nominated for stylish picture this time has been bogged in some contestation, said Michael Schulman, author of “ Oscar Wars A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Gashes. ”
Director Brady Corbet defended the use of artificial intelligence in “ The Brutalist ” to perfect actor Adrien Brody’s and Felicity Jones’ delivery of the Hungarian dialogue in the film.
Brazil’s Fernanda Torres, who’s nominated for stylish actress for her depiction of a woman searching for her disappeared hubby in “ I’m Still Then, ” apologized for appearing in blackface in a decades-old TV squib.
“ I wrote a piece for the New Yorker comparing it to ‘ Conclave,’ because the whole thing just reminds me of the movie, where every seeker running for Pope has some shell in his closet, ” said Schulman.
Contestation has frequently dogged Oscar front- runners.
“ Green Book ” director Peter Farrelly apologized for being “ an idiot ” after The Cut reported that he’d exposed himself to actress Cameron Diaz in what he called an attempt at humor. The film went on to win stylish picture in 2019, despite the disclosure.
occasionally, the juggernauts are augmented by an opponent- as when Harvey Weinstein mounted a bruiting crusade against Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic, “ Saving Private Ryan, ” with its acclaimed recreation of the irruption of Normandy. “ Weinstein was telling intelligencers’ Do not you suppose that the only really good part of the movie is the first 25 twinkles, the D- Day sequence, and also the rest of it’s just the standard World War II picture?’ ” said Schulman, who proved the crusade in his book. “ This was his interpretation of that Karl Rove credo in politics like, ‘ Do not attack your adversary’s weakness. Attack your adversary’s strength.’ He managed to take this stunning battle scene and turn it into a liability. ”
Weinstein, whose Miramax film “ Shakespeare in Love ” won stylish picture that time, denied censuring the Spielberg film.
” I would noway deign to that position,” he told New York magazine in 1999.
As in politics, the particular can be delicate to separate from the on- screen performance.
The 2016 film “ The Birth of a Nation, ” a story about a slave rebellion that was written and directed by Nate Parker, came overshadowed by exposures Parker had been charged, and latterly acquitted, of violating a fellow pupil while at Penn State.
A Variety story that time detailing how Parker’s appellant committed self-murder in 2012 sparked a box office and awards counterreaction.
“ It was over in a alternate, ” said one superintendent involved in the film, which had been seen as a stylish picture contender.
This composition was generated from an automated news agency feed without variations to textbook.
