By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | January 31, 2025 |
Over the past couple of days, various tweets of actress Karla Sofía Gascón came to light that revealed the extent of her astonishing bigotry. The star of the film Emilia Pérez, a musical drama about a trans cartel leader, made history earlier this month by becoming the first out trans woman to receive a Best Actress nomination at the Oscars. The film itself, directed by Frenchman Jacques Audiard, is the most nominated movie of the year. In what should be a moment of celebration, Gascón has instead found herself exposed as someone rather repugnant.
The tweets, which date back several years but were as recent as last year, involve astonishingly numerous screeds of racist, Islamophobic, and queerphobic rhetoric. She was anti-Asian racist towards the COVID-19 vaccination, called George Floyd a ‘drug addict swindler’, and derided the 93rd Academy Awards, where Daniel Kaluuya and Youn Yuh-jung were among the winners, as an ‘Afro-Korean festival.’ In one post, she said, ‘Sorry, is it just me or are there more Muslims in Spain? Every time I pick up my daughter from school there are more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their heels. Next year instead of English, we’ll have to teach Arabic.’ That’s actually one of the tamer tweets in terms of her Islamophobia. The tweets just kept on coming, and it began to feel like Gascón had never tweeted a non-bigoted thing in her life.
The day after, Gascón issued a hilariously cheap and self-aggrandizing apology. She wrote, ‘All my life I have fought for a better world. I believe light will always triumph over darkness.’ To which I say, you, Ms. Gascón, are the darkness.
Awards season campaigning is full of messy and often dirty tactics. The 2024 roster has frequently felt like a return to the days of Miramax-style aggression and subterfuge, with studios spending huge amounts of money to get their movie to the Academy stage. Netflix has not been shy in their agenda for Emilia Pérez, which they hope will land them their first-ever Best Picture winner. They beat out multiple studios to acquire the distribution rights for $8 million out of Cannes. They have sent out lavish FYC kits to critics and industry figures. Their campaign has largely hinged upon its historic precedence, and with Gascón as the face of that. She was pushed to Best Actress despite having less screen time than Zoe Saldana, who is nominated in the supporting category. She was the one who accepted the film’s Golden Globe award and talked eloquently about supporting trans people in the midst of a terrifying time for the community. A triumph for Emilia Pérez was a triumph for the trans community, so Netflix has wanted this season to declare. How very Weinstein-esque of them.
One has to wonder if Netflix set aside any money in their expensive awards campaign to media train their lead actress and sift through her social media history. That seems like a basic requirement for a 2025 Oscar run. Personally, I’m glad they didn’t do a clean-up. Let sunlight be the best disinfectant, right?
It barely mattered to them that the film has been, to put it mildly, controversial among both the trans and Mexican communities. It’s a film about a murderous cartel leader who transitions in secret and then returns to the limelight to be a faux-saint. Jacques Audiard has repeatedly admitted he did no research on either Mexico or the reality of cartel violence. GLAAD called it ‘a profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman’ and ‘a step backward for trans representation.’ Spanish philosopher and filmmaker Paul B. Preciado, who made the excellent Orlando, My Political Biography, described the film as ‘a polysemic amalgam loaded with racism and transphobia, anti-Latino exoticism and melodramatic binarism’ that ‘reinforces the colonial and pathologizing narrative’ of both Mexican culture and gender transition. Trans-Mexican artists responded by making their own parody film called Johanne Sacreblu, about a trans heir to a baguette company.
Conflating a piece of art, however bad it may be, with the awful person headlining it is typically ill-advised. We’ve all watched films we love that star gross bigots and had to do the old separating of art and artist just to find the energy to get on with our lives. With Emilia Pérez, Netflix can help to take the blame for making this divide much harder. After all, they’re the company so desperate for Oscar glory that they steamrolled over months’ of concerns and criticism to push this one woman as being the ground-breaking face of a community they cared so little about. It should be a moment of celebration that an out trans actor has been Oscar-nominated after decades of watching cis men in dresses exemplify every nasty stereotype against trans women and perpetuate a cultural cruelty. Instead, it’s been a reminder that even marginalized people can be as bigoted as anyone else.
Frankly, it makes too much sense for the star of Emilia Pérez to be as close-minded and cruel as the film she headlines, all of which has been furiously sold as a sign of progress and the Academy’s new open-mindedness. One is almost worried that they’ll sympathize with Gascón more after those tweets since getting mad about industry diversity and hating Muslims isn’t something white elites are exactly punished for. The Academy notoriously doesn’t like being told what to do. Some voters admitted to doubling down in their support for Green Book after it faced criticism from Black critics and audiences over its Driving Miss Daisy-esque portrayal of race relations in the 1950s. I wouldn’t put it past them to throw their weight behind Emilia Pérez and reassert it as An Important Film.
But personally, I think this is the end of the road for Gascón’s campaign. I doubt there’s a PR-mandated apology good enough to mitigate her years of hatred but the one she gave certainly wasn’t close to appropriate. Her own self-importance has crumbled in the face of pure arrogance and repulsive bigotry that is a greater representation of Emilia Pérez than any FYC campaign could ever embody.