Is the Emilia Perez Oscar Campaign the Most Disastrous in Hollywood History?

In the days following the revelation of tweets by Emilia Perez actress Karla Sofia Gascon that showed her to be a staggeringly committed racist, things have only gotten more exhausting. Gascon, the first-ever trans woman to be nominated for Best Actress, has gone on the offensive with TV appearances, melodramatic statements, and even more tweets in a doomed attempt to salvage her chances at winning an Oscar.

Gascon has insisted that she’s not a racist despite being a big sh*tting racist and that she’s being unfairly punished for tweets so racist that even all the other racists inhaled in shock. In response, the cast, crew, and distributor of Emilia Perez have collectively tried to stop their ship from sinking. Director Jacques Audiard said he didn’t want to talk to Gascon after what he saw. Co-star Zoe Saldana said she was saddened by the tweets and condemned Gascon’s rhetoric. Netflix has been accused of removing the actress who plays their movie’s title character from their aggressive awards season campaigning, omitting her name from email blasts and the like. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the streaming giant is not financially supporting Gascon’s campaign stops at the Critics’ Choice Awards and Producers Guild Awards (it’s typical for studios to pay for things like accommodation, stylists, etc, for its above-the-title nominees.) Otherwise, however, Netflix has remained curiously silent on Gascon’s racism. They haven’t issued any statements condemning it. They’re just quietly smudging her name away while pushing forward with their attempt to make Emilia Perez their first-ever Best Picture winner.

Awards campaigning for the Oscars has long been a weird and messy tradition. For as long as the Academy Awards have existed there have been dodgy dealings and shameless pleading in an attempt to win the most prestigious title in Hollywood. Studio heads would buy steak dinners for voters. They’d spend millions of dollars on ad campaigns and make their stars walk every red carpet. The Oscars has been mired in scandal and industry-defining moments. But with Emilia Perez and its star’s total implosion, I feel like we’re seeing something totally new in Oscars history: the most disastrous campaign in history. I don’t say that lightly but I’ve also spent too much time trying to think of something that comes even close to the calamity of Gascon and her film and I’ve come up short.

Most awards campaign drama is petty and seems pointless to those with a passing interest in the film world. It tends to be bureaucratic in form and shady in ways that seem ridiculous to outsiders. Andrea Riseborough landing a surprise Best Actress nomination for To Leslie seemed so scandalous to many because it was a starkly efficient bypassing of the expected ways of campaigning, but it was ultimately just a savvy piece of marketing done on a low budget. She wasn’t the first to do it either, as everyone who remembers Melissa Leo’s camp ‘Consider’ posters can attest to.

Most of the bitchiest For Your Consideration drama of the ’90s, when companies like Miramax were at their meddling peak, was done behind the scenes with ‘sources’ spreading the bad word: the whispers against Saving Private Ryan, the barrages of phone calls to beleaguered voters, the wall-to-wall adverts in the trades. You could call out the accuracy of a film, like when A Beautiful Mind was attacked for its seeming whitewashing of John Nash’s life, but it was considered gauche (and against the rules) to name your opponents directly. It’s also worth noting that, prior to those tweets going viral, Gascon had already faced controversy by accusing the team of fellow Best Actress nominee Fernanda Torres of smearing Emilia Perez behind the scenes.

Generally speaking, there is an expectation of publicly presenting classiness in your campaign, but negativity is still okay. You just have to deploy your message savvily. Miramax was said to have paid consultants to help spread the rhetoric that Saving Private Ryan was great for the first 20 minutes but not after that, which may have helped Shakespeare in Love to win Best Picture that year. They didn’t slag off Spielberg’s talent publicly or name him in stories but they didn’t need to.

Harvey Weinstein is, unsurprisingly, considered one of the real game-changers in how awards campaigning happens. He notoriously outspent the competition, did it for longer throughout the year, and had no qualms about bending the rules to get his message across. Miramax targeted voters directly, doing things like hosting screenings in Academy nursing homes with captive audiences of voters or making their films available at vacation hotspots like Aspen during the Christmas break. His team would call up voters to ask if they’d received their VHS screeners. They’d host starry parties at exclusive locales to encourage a level of schmoozing that was within the Academy’s campaigning rules but still made voters feel special. Even after Weinstein left Miramax to start up The Weinstein Company, he could still put together an aggressively effective campaign. When the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game came out, TWC put up massive posters with the slogan, ‘Honor the man. Honor the film.’ He wasn’t the first to encourage voters to directly signal their own political smugness with the message of a movie but he did help to secure how the Oscars of the current era use the awards as a platform for this connection.

After Harvey Weinstein was revealed to be a serial predator (around the time he stopped being of use to the industry that fostered his abuses for decades), there was talk that perhaps we would enter the post-Miramax age of Oscar campaigning. Perhaps now would be a good time to step away from the ceaseless negativity and smears that had made everyone feel like a pig rolling around in the mud. The Saving Private Ryan drama had left a lot of the industry worried that things had gone too far, although they were also only too happy to sink further if it meant a chance at winning that little gold man.

Certainly, we had a good few years in the late 2010s and early 2020s wehre campaigns seemed, if not wall-to-wall positive then at least less openly seedy. Issues like #OscarsSoWhite saw incremental changes happen to the institution and positive shifts in which films were awarded. Think about it: I doubt something like Everything Everywhere All at Once would have been a Best Picture winner in a Miramax-dominated season. A lot still needs to improve, of course, but there’s still a stark difference between the Oscars of 2024 and the Oscars of 1997.

With Emilia Perez, Netflix didn’t play dirty but they did go big with both money and message. They spent a reported $8 million to acquire the film when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won two awards. Their campaigning has been relentless, with jam-packed and pricy FYC packages being sent to critics. The stars, including Gascon, Saldana and Selena Gomez, were shipped off to every event and trades interview junket. Ads talked not only of the audaciousness of a musical about a trans cartel leader but of the importance of Gascon’s presence on and off the screen. Wasn’t it finally time to celebrate the true diversity and artistic beauty of the world by letting a trans actress lead a film and be awarded for it? It certainly made a change after decades’ of nominations for cis men playing tragic trans women imbued with every horrid stereotype under the sun. When Emlia Perez won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy/Musical, it was Gascon who gave an eloquent speech on supporting trans people in the face of abject bigotry from a cruel administration.

Plenty of bad films have won Oscars. Green Book is a Best Picture winner. So is Crash. Earnest but pig-headed displays of white liberalism and saviour complexes do well with a group whose membership is largely made up of old white dudes who think the kids play their music too loud. So it wasn’t the shock of the century that Hollywood and its surrounding structures would be so gung-ho about a movie that was widely rejected by both trans and Mexican audiences as a bigoted mess. It’s easier for a campaign to spread the message that they’re important and special than actually being important or special. To overwhelm the dissenting voices is to essentially posit the narrative that those marginalized communities matter less than you, even when you claim to be supporting them.

Jacques Audiard bragged about having done no research on Mexico or cartel violence prior to making Emilia Perez, and this statement wasn’t immediately pilloried by the industry because they don’t care. A well-monied and effective campaign is designed to ensure that the voter feels like the most important person in the conversation, not the art, artist, or those impacted by its message. That’s why it was easy for Netflix too sell Emilia Perez as a crucial step forward for trans representation to those who otherwise would grumble that audiences are too woke. How could such a message not fall horribly flat when your new idol tweets incessantly about kicking Muslims out of Spain?

There’s also the social media of it all. These tweets were unearthed by Twitter users like journalist Sarah Hagi and fans like the users of the Awards Worthy forums. They weren’t hard to find and yet Netflix’s pricey campaign apparently had no funds set aside for some overworked intern to check Gascon’s account prior to putting her on the campaign trail. Even the most online of studios seemed horribly unprepared for the converging of awards season and Stan Twitter. Prior to Gascon, Fernanda Torres had faced her own controversy when social media users dug up an old clip of her in blackface. Hagi was accused of being a studio plant, because some felt it was unlikely that a non-industry figure would care about such matters. They questioned her intentions, as if old-school awards campaigning was always done with a stridently altruistic mindset. One wonders if Netflix assumed that being a trans person was synonymous with being a good person, or at least a progressively minded one of unquestionable intentions.

Most recently, Gascon has said via Instagram that she hoped her silence (ha) would ‘allow the film to be appreciated for what it is, a beautiful ode to love and difference’ (haaaaa.) We’ll wait and see on that front. Netflix still wants to make history and it remains to be seen if Gascon’s racism has tainted the entire Emilia Perez campaign. There will be sympathy for them, or certainly for Saldana, who was the Best Supporting Actress frontrunner and has a lot of industry goodwill after years of being a blockbuster headliner. But doing an Emilia Perez blitz without Emilia Perez? Trying to avoid that elephant in the room will only foster further gawking and louder questions. Every event Saldana, Audiard and Gomez go to will be loaded with queries about how they feel about Gascon’s racism. Audience reactions to the film at awards ceremonies will be hyper-analyzed. Think-pieces will be written (like mine.)

The Academy doesn’t like being told what to do by meddling outsiders but it also desperately wants to maintain its reputation, such as it is. I’ve seen arguments that they may vote for Emilia Perez just to spite the haters. I don’t see that happening personally. Voting for Emilia Perez, at this moment in time, cannot be disconnected from the face of the movie and the things she said over the course of several years. Netflix can try to keep Gascon to the sidelines and ask voters to focus on the art over the artist, but they’ve never been great at that and I don’t expect them to suddenly embrace literary theory about the death of the author now. The campaigning will continue but now it’s the equivalent of moving deckchairs around on the Titanic.

And Netflix will probably remain silent on Gascon’s racism. That’s what reveals the true callousness of their dreadful awards campaign to me: the cowardice over condemning bigotry because it might risk them a statuette they never earned or deserved. Progressiveness and the power of diversity only matter when the bottom line is guaranteed. Gascon made their campaign a disaster but Netflix doomed themselves further by revealing their crooked priorities. Maybe the Weinstein-esque campaigns of cruelty and backstabbing never went away, but they did get way stupider.