Column: How Karla Sofia Gascón turned a historic Oscars first into a historic Oscars nightmare
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Karla Sofia Gascón has put Oscar voters between a historic first and a hard place.
When she received a nomination for best actress in a leading role for her work in Netflix’s film “Emilia Pérez,” Gascón became not only the first out transgender person to be nominated for an acting award, but also the odds-on favorite. With 13 nods, including for picture, international feature and director, “Emilia Pérez” received more nominations than any other film this year.
Though criticized by LGBTQ viewers for its depiction of the trans experience and by Mexican viewers for a stereotypical portrait of the country, “Emilia Pérez” seemed an easy fit for a film academy that has spent years growing and diversifying its membership to better mirror the world with its myriad stories and artists.
So much so that historic firsts have become a looked-for feature of the Oscar telecast.
But Gascón, it turns out, is not the model of progressive politics and aspirational representation that Netflix and many academy members assumed she would be. Recently resurfaced racist, anti-Muslim and openly anti-diversity tweets have upended the Oscar campaign not just for Gascón but for every “Emilia Pérez” nominee.
She quickly apologized for the tweets in question (and denied writing one that slammed her co-star Selena Gomez altogether), saying, among other things, that she had in the past used social media as “a diary,” that her views about Muslims have evolved, that the sentiments had been mischaracterized or taken out of context, and that she regrets any pain her words might have caused.
She also repeatedly intimated that the appearance of the tweets was part of a smear campaign. Her recent interview with CNN en Español was by turns contrite, combative and self-pitying. “I believe I have been judged,” she said. “I have been convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned without a trial and without the option to defend myself.”
“Emilia Perez” might have the most Oscar nominations, but it’s not No. 1 for this critic.
Since that interview, which was not authorized by Netflix, the streamer has reportedly all but shut down Gascón’s awards campaign. According to the Hollywood Reporter, she will no longer be attending the AFI Awards, the Critics Choice Awards, the Producers Guild Awards (at which she was scheduled to be a presenter) or the Santa Barbara Film Festival. She has already been removed from some digital FYC advertising for the film.
The obvious question is why Netflix, with its extensive awards team, social media savvy and budget, did not deal with Gascón’s tweets long before the Oscar race began. And the answer appears to be that they did not think it was necessary. That as a trans woman, Gascón would, as she has since said, understand the difficulties faced by minorities and not go out of her way to exacerbate them.
But being trans is an issue of personal identity, not a political belief system; fighting for one’s own right to live an authentic life does not automatically translate to one wider set of beliefs or another. To assume that trans women and men are monolithic in their views, or incapable of holding bigoted beliefs, is absurd. Karla Sofia Gascón is a person, not a political template.
She and “Emilia Pérez” were always going to put this Oscar race on the front lines of the culture war, where divisions over gender — its reality, roles and rights — lead to many of the biggest battles. But support for the film, which might have been seen as a form of pushback against President Trump’s attempts to curtail transgender rights, has suddenly become something else entirely.
With its controversies over artificial intelligence (“The Brutalist”), blackface (Fernanda Torres of “I’m Still Here”) and intimacy coordinators (“Anora”), this Oscar season has been compared to the pontifical politics of “Conclave.”
Based on the Robert Harris novel, “Conclave” explores the difference between the actual and the symbolic. A series of cardinals, each representing a starkly different view of the Church, become front-runners — only to have their conflicting and very human failings exposed. In the end, a long-shot candidate is chosen in part because he “exists between certainties.”
If she has done nothing else, Gascón has exposed the space that exists between our current “certainties.”
The nominations for the 97th Academy Awards, to be held on March 2, have been announced. Here’s the list of 2025 Oscar nominees.
If she were cisgender, she might expect the “anti-woke” mob, including Trump and Elon Musk, to come to her defense, to disparage Hollywood liberals for “canceling” a performer whose work they had just honored because she publicly aired views they find objectionable. But conservative forces have too thoroughly coalesced around transphobia to make that possible.
Nor can they successfully argue that this is what comes of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which Trump is currently using as a de-funding target. In one of the controversial tweets, Gascón herself decries the academy’s own initiatives in language Musk would applaud. Referring to the 2021 Oscars ceremony, she wrote: “More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films, I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or [International Women’s Day].”
Meanwhile, liberals who celebrated her nomination and were prepared to mark her “historic first” have been caught flat-footed. There is no denying either the wide-ranging hatefulness of her prior remarks or the remarkable nature of her nomination, though the chances of it becoming a win dwindle with each passing day.
More important, the knee-jerk expectations around and sanctification of such firsts have been dealt a blow. There is nothing wrong with crafting a diversity-positive awards narrative around any film or potential nominee, but whoever is doing the crafting had better make darn sure that the narrative fits the subject.
Now the issue seems to be how far the damage will spread. Viewed through the lens of scandal, earlier criticisms of “Emilia Pérez’s” depiction of Mexican culture and portrayal of a trans woman may take on increased resonance. And some voters could balk at the prospect of an Oscar telecast dominated by apologies for/defenses of one woman’s social media vitriol.
Not surprisingly, many people are now discussing who will “benefit” should “Emilia Pérez” fall from real contention, which is understandable but unfortunate. None of the other nominees deserve to be seen as second choices should they win, and there is no predicting how people will actually vote. (Americans especially have lately shown a high tolerance for incendiary speech.) A lot can still happen before voting closes on Feb. 18.
For now, the most unpredictable Oscar race in recent memory will continue to exist between the certainties. All we can be sure of after the Gascón news cycle is that just because a woman is one thing doesn’t mean she is another. And that no one should be using social media as a diary.
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