Last August, when I met and interviewed Karla Sofia Gasco, star of “Emilia Pérez”, she told me it was not the type that retreats in the face of a conflict. “I’m a great warrior,” said Gascon at the time. “I love to fight. If I depended on me, I would go to all the talk shows and fight with everyone all the time. ”
She shared this to illustrate how her life became troubled in the years preceding “Emilia Pérez,” when Gascon, previously known by the Mexican audience for her soap opera work, took publicly as a trans woman. But this tip on its combative nature could also have been considered a preview, now that the newly named Oscar has been involved in a scandal-and embarked on a challenging media blitz-which endangered both his career and the prizes campaign earlier. Favorite of “Emilia Pérez”.
Until last week, the 52 -year -old actress and the Spanish musical she starred in. With 13 Oscar nominations, “Emilia Pérez” represented Netflix’s best chance of finally winning her first best film trophy, while Gascon had already made history as the first trans actress to be nominated for the Oscars.
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Then, last Wednesday, journalist Sarah Hagi dug up old posts that Gascon had written on the social platform X, who denigrated Muslims (saying that Islam was “becoming a focus of infection for humanity that urgently needs to be healed”))) , called George Floyd “drug addict” and criticized the various winners of the 2021 Oscars broadcast (“I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a demonstration of Black Lives Matter or 8-M”) . In a statement issued by Netflix the next day, Gascon apologized for the posts. But instead of letting the dust sit, the star took the reins of the situation.
After disabled your X account, Gascon sent a long and challenging message to The Hollywood Reporter to inform your detractors: “The more you try to sink me, the stronger it will make me.” In an interview subsequent to CNN en Español, which she herself scheduled, Gascon cried, said that an X post where she seemed to insult her co-star in “Emilia Pérez”, Selena Gomez, had been tampered with, and said, “I can’t renounce an Oscar nomination because I did not commit any crime. ”
Meanwhile, Gascon continued to set up an almost daily defense on his Instagram account, which kept the controversy in headlines. None of his latest actions have been sanctioned by Netflix, and platform strategists should now determine how to save a prize campaign that once seemed right to win several Oscars.
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It is the most recent and striking example of a trend that intensified this year, in which award strategists who used to influence the race with targeted whisper campaigns were taken as surprise by controversies that originate online and quickly get out of control. Now, the Oscar season has become a decentralized battlefield, where social media detectives, and fans’ armies are dug up past gaffes, bad tweets and harmful clips, amplifying them in X, Tiktok and subreddits adjacent to awards.
That’s why, in the weeks that preceded Oscar nominations, “the brutalist” was criticized on social networks for using a speech tool to improve the Hungarian spoken by star Adrien Brody, while “Anora” was criticized for not employing an intimacy coordinator. The rise of the Brazilian nominee The best actress Fernanda Torres further increased the confusion, as her fan base on social networks attacked Gascon by implying that people associated with towers were “destroying me and” Emilia Pérez “. Days later, it was towers who had to apologize when Oscar’s virtual obsessed found a 2008 clip of her performing in Blackface in a Brazilian comedy program.
Not all these controversies on social networks come to the world very offline that most Oscar voters tend to live. In the past, competitors such as “Green Book: The Guide” and “Three Advertisements for a Crime” faced online disapproval for their racial issues and even won several Oscars. And although “Emilia Pérez” has been criticized online since last year for her unkind staging of mexican trans and culture, very little was on the radar of Oscar voters, who in large part consider the film bold and progressive.
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Still, the Gastic Fiasco has been inevitable, according to many of the gym members and industry figures I spoke last week. Oscar liberal voters who were inclined to support the trans empowerment narrative of “Emilia Pérez” as a rebuke to President Donald Trump can now find this mission complicated by the old Gascons tweets, especially after the publication Variety He has published a recent editorial about the Gascon Press Blitz that considered the uncompromising actress as the “Donald Trump of the Oscar Season.”
So what happens to the campaign of “Emilia Pérez” now, with less than a month for the Oscar ceremony on March 2? In the short term, Netflix began to focus its campaign around the co-star of Gascon, Zoe Saldaña, a favorite of the industry who is considered a strong candidate for supporting actress Oscar. But the length of which this affected the chances of the movie of winning the best movie will remain uncertain for a while.
Regardless of the end result, this controversy will surely change the way award campaigns are conducted from now on. Many in the industry were surprised that Netflix strategists and Gascon’s own advisers could not persuade her to erase her old posts on social networks before Oscar candidacy exposed her to a new level of global criticism. You can expect this type of general purge to be a common practice in campaigns in the future.
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Meanwhile, the Oscar strategists will have to take into account their own blind points. GASCON is expected to eventually do so too. When I interviewed her last August, these blind spots emerged as she spoke passionately about the case of Olympic boxer Iman Khelif, whose eligibility had been questioned by people like JK Rowling, the author of “Harry Potter.”
“It’s always the same story as these same people trying to find a new victim to generate more hatred,” said Gasco. “It is a constant element in human history. Before, they were people in color or women or workers. Now they are trans people. ”
His voice rose. “And even me, maybe without even knowing, I have some prejudice or critical some communities because we all do it,” said Gasco.
