Last week, I wrote about Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón and her increasingly off-the-rails, weirdly defiant apology tour for (not so) old racist, xenophobic, homophobic tweets that resurfaced in the wake of her Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Gascón is the first out transgender actor to be nominated for an Academy Award, no small feat. Despite Emilia Pérez being a trashcan fire of a movie, a lot of people were glad to see Gascón be recognized for her performance (she shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes with her co-stars, Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez). But now the situation is so out of control, people are beginning to wonder if Gascón will even show up for the next spate of awards shows.
The situation devolved so fast that in Friday’s Squawk mailbag I said that there are two weeks before final voting for the Oscars begins, plenty of time for Gascón to clean it up and not tank her campaign. But by the end of the weekend, Lainey and I were wondering if she has now tanked Zoe Saldaña’s campaign by association. Saldaña is the presumed frontrunner for Best Supporting Actress, and I think she still is the leader in that category, but what should have been a relatively smooth path to victory for Saldaña now looks like a thorny march through her co-star’s flubs and blunders and hate speech.
The Rubicon was crossed Saturday night when Gascón gave an interview to CNN en Español, which you can watch here:
The Hollywood Reporter includes this incredible line in their writeup of the interview: “Gascón set up the interview on her own without the involvement of anyone working on the film, which was distributed by Netflix.”
The crux of Gascón’s defense is still that shadowy someones are deliberately torpedoing her Oscar chances, and that her tweets are being misrepresented. This last part is not the whole picture, though. You can see a summary here, but she covered the major hate bases with Islamophobia, racism, calling George Floyd a “drug addict and a hustler” in the immediate wake of his death, and bashing the 2021 Oscars for being “an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M” and calling it an “ugly, ugly gala”. 2021, if you’ll recall, was the year Chloe Zhao and Nomadland triumphed, and Daniel Kaluuya won Best Supporting Actor for Judas and the Black Messiah. She also called BTS “those f-cking Chinese BTS members”, though they’re all Korean, and referred to her EP co-star Selena Gomez as a “rich rat”, so she has multiple stan groups after her, too.
But take that George Floyd comment, she was trying to make a larger point about anti-Black police violence, but she could not separate that from hateful language. Similarly, some—emphasis on SOME—of her Islamophobic tweets also condemned Christianity, deeming that they “violate human rights”. But it’s not better, because she’s just offended other people alongside Muslims in her statement, and I don’t think this context helps her at all. You can talk about anti-Blackness without resorting to hateful language, but she did not do that. And none of that accounts for why she found the 2021 Oscars distasteful, or for reducing separate Asian ethnicities into one offensive monolith. Whatever points Gascón thought she was making were inevitably and always undone by her hateful language.
This is all stuff she put out on a public forum, and not all that long ago. People will inevitably evoke the specter of cancel culture, but once again, all that is happening is that Gascón is being held accountable for stuff she said, with accountability simply amounting to people saying, “Hey, did you hear what Karla Sofía Gascón said?” People relaying what you say isn’t cancel culture, it’s just people relaying what you say.
As for the Oscars, the Academy probably won’t rescind her nomination—a drastic step they’re always loathe to take whenever the sh-t hits the fan during awards season—and Gascón says she will not withdraw, saying, “I have not committed any crime.” And no one ever said she committed a crime! It was just pointed out she said a lot of awful sh-t, and people like her less now that she’s an on-the-record asshole. That’s kind of how that works. Now, according to The Hollywood Reporter she will not be travelling to LA for the award shows and award season events this week and Netflix is removing her from the campaign. Per THR, “that there is no great interest on the part of Netflix to provide the usual courtesies afforded by a studio to an Oscar contender, such as transportation and accommodations, to facilitate her attendance at the remaining award season gatherings.”
Also, I wonder if/when Fernanda Torres’ blackface scandal will become a bigger deal—Torres already issued an apology, which everyone seems happy to accept—or if Zoe Saldaña will have to talk about darkening her skin and wearing prosthetics to play Nina Simone in the biopic Nina. I’m not convinced Gascón is the victim of a targeted campaign but given that other high-profile nominees also have some shady racist sh-t in their closets that isn’t getting aired out nearly as hard, I do wonder if transphobia is an exacerbating factor. If people are ready to hate women, they’re definitely ready to hate transwomen, too.
That Torres’s blackface incident and apology has basically disappeared a week later, and that Saldaña isn’t answering questions about Nina, might be in part to their relative silence on the matters—Torres issued her apology and dropped it. She isn’t out here scheduling rogue interviews. But I don’t want to rule out that some people might be primed to dump on Gascón just because she’s trans. Yes, she said all that sh-t and she should be held accountable, but we know how these things magnify online, especially on social media, and we can’t divorce transphobia from the backlash facing Gascón, who has been subjected to hate speech herself for being trans. One doesn’t cancel out the other, but we can question which is legitimate criticism and which is people using this as cover for their transphobia.
Finally, Netflix has an exclusive deal with award campaign strategist Lisa Taback, widely regarded as the best in the business, to shape their Oscar campaigns. Can you imagine being Lisa Taback finding out about this interview? Just thinking about it makes me want to crush my cellphone in my hand, and I’m just watching from the sidelines. I cannot fathom spending the better part of a whole year nurturing an award campaign, seeing my work rewarded with over a dozen Oscar nominations, only for this sh-t to happen behind my back. Forget Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, Lisa Taback and Karla Sofía Gascón have the text messages I want to read.
