The furor over racist and anti-Muslim tweets from Best Actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón has left the Oscar campaign for Gascón and her film, “Emilia Pérez,” badly damaged and may well be dead, but there it’s also possible that the film could take less of a hit than its star.
Given this year’s awards-season calendar, “Emilia Pérez” could conceivably weather the storm and do what it’s done so far this season: win awards despite the fact that it’s the lowest-rated of the Best Picture nominees on Metacritic, and despite months of social media attacks that find it lacking on a variety of fronts.
With a strategy of isolation and repudiation, which already began with co-star Zoe Saldaña’s comments that she “(doesn’t) have any tolerance for any negative rhetoric towards people of any group,” Netflix will have its job cut out for it to distance the film from its star, who also happens to be the person who served as the public face of “Emilia Pérez” in the press room of the Golden Globes, where it won four awards.
“She was never going to win,” said one strategist who is no stranger to Oscar controversies. “The question is how much it will hurt the film.”
Making matters even more difficult: This year’s Best Picture race is exceptionally tight, with “Emilia Pérez” seeming to be a narrow frontrunner but “The Brutalist,” “Anora,” “Wicked,” “A Complete Unknown” and “Conclave” all having paths to victory.
The Academy’s ranked-choice voting system rewards movies that show up in the No. 2 and 3 spots on a large number of ballots, and anything that nudges a movie lower on the ballots of even a small percentage of voters can be risky.
But it’s not always deadly. The last time something like this happened was six years ago, when the film was “Green Book” and the offensive comments had come from one of its writers and producers, Nick Vallelonga. At that time, the furor did not stick: Universal Pictures kept Vallelonga off the campaign trail for the last couple of months and the film won Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay, giving Vallelonga himself a pair of Oscars.
Still, the furor over “Emilia Pérez” will be harder to shrug off so easily, because there’s more to it than the single tweet that Vallelonga sent backing up Donald Trump’s inaccurate claim that Muslims in New Jersey cheered the collapse of the World Trade Centers on 9/11.
It began with a Brazilian TV interview in which Gascón charged that people close to “I’m Still Here” star Fernanda Torres, a fellow Best Actress nominee, had been deriding her on social media. This was widely reported on social media, accompanied by suggestions that Gascón’s comments violated Oscar campaign regulations – an unfounded charge, as the Academy quickly pointed out.
But what could have been dismissed as a social-media attempt to take down a movie that had become the default frontrunner turned out to be much more than that, because Gascón’s social media account from the time before she made “Emilia Pérez” included anti-Muslim and anti-vax posts, among many others that sparked outrage when they were circulated.
Her Best Actress campaign is in tatters now, although you could argue that it was in tatters as soon as Demi Moore walked off the stage at the Golden Globes after winning Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy and making a widely praised and moving speech.
Netflix, which acquired the film after its debut at the Cannes Film Festival, where Gascón and three other actresses shared the Best Actress award, has not addressed whether it did research into the social-media account of its then-unknown star. The pace of film-festival acquisitions for hot titles could make it difficult to do much research prior to making the deal for a reported $12 million, but the deal was announced in late May. That’s months before the awards campaign would start in earnest, months in which investigation, scrubbing and media training could presumably have taken place.
The question now is how this will hurt the film with voters. The first three major awards shows coming up are the Critics Choice Awards on Feb. 7 and the Directors Guild Awards and Producers Guild Awards on Feb. 8. The Screen Actors Guild follows on Feb. 23, and the Oscars on March 2.
Critics Choice voting ended on Jan. 10, so there’s no chance for this week’s revelations to affect the results. Producers Guild balloting opened on Jan. 13 and ended on Thursday, meaning the only voters who could change their minds were the ones who chose to vote on the final day. Directors Guild voting has been going on for more than three weeks and has one week remaining, time for some late voters to change their mind if they think that Gascón’s comments should affect Jacques Audiard’s chances.
Voting for the SAG Awards, at which Gascón is nominated for Best Actress, opened two weeks ago, on Jan. 15, but continues for another three weeks, meaning it’s likely that most voters have yet to cast ballots. And Oscar voting doesn’t begin until Feb. 11.
History suggests that social-media controversies don’t register much with Oscar voters: “Emilia Pérez,” after all, received more nominations than any other film at a time when it had been slammed online for a variety of perceived sins, including that French director Audiard made it in France instead of Mexico and used a cast of largely non-Mexican actors (with accents that were in many cases dodgy to native speakers), and that it used derogatory Mexican stereotypes in its treatment of a transgender character.
But this furor has moved well beyond social media, into mainstream outlets that may have more of an impact on voters. For Netflix, the road forward will probably mean making Gascón scarce on the campaign circuit, although she’s supposed to be at the Critics Choice Awards as a nominee on Feb. 7, at the Producers Guild Awards as a presenter on Feb. 8 and at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival as one of the honorees on a “Virtuosos” panel on Feb. 9. No one is commenting yet on whether she’ll appear, but discussions are underway and it would hardly be a surprise if she was a no-show at all of those events.
Meanwhile, it’s all but inevitable that other members of the “Emilia Pérez” team make their own statements disavowing Gascón social-media comments; if they don’t, every appearance they make will be ‘shijacked by questions about her.
In a very tight Oscar race, the controversies that consumed “Emilia Pérez” could come back to kill it on March 2 – or they could have settled squarely on Gascón and faded when it comes to the film itself.
In late November, Gascón talked to TheWrap for the cover of an Oscar magazine. When she was asked about the effect that “Emilia Pérez” could have in a time of great division over transgender issues, she offered a prediction that now seems both prophetic and self-deluding.
“It won’t help me personally, because I’m going to become a target,” she said. “But I’m used to it, because everywhere in the world, it’s the same. There are people who hate others just for existing, and I think it’s quite sad and pitiful that people like that win elections. What should really happen is that all sides should join together, left or right or whatever label you want to use, and be clear about our rights and obligations as human beings. And not take away rights or impose obligations on a group of people because they have a different color of skin or different sexuality.
“Quite frankly, I am expecting that the attacks are going to come. I’m ready for it.”
