The Emilia Pérez Controversies Just Keep Piling Up
The polarizing film should win an Oscar for biggest awards-season mess.
Emilia Pérez is this year’s most divisive Oscar nominee — for more reasons than one. Culture critics and film lovers have spent the past month debating the film’s merits (or, depending on who you ask, lack thereof). But things really started to reach a boiling point this week when some rather distasteful old comments from both the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón, and writer-director Jacques Audiard resurfaced in a span of just a couple of days. The many threads of controversy have been hard to follow, requiring an interested reader to wade through old tweets both vetted and unverified, multiple public apologies, and even suspicions about whether or not the academy’s social media regulations had been violated. But don’t worry, I trudged through Emilia Pérez’s muck so you don’t have to. Read on for a breakdown of the wild controversy surrounding one of this awards season’s strongest contenders.
OK, I’ve got my popcorn and I’m ready for the drama. How did everything start?
While this train of escalating drama has taken off faster than the speed of light, it seems like the tides began to turn when Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón — the lead actress of Emilia Pérez, who made history as the first openly transgender person to ever be nominated for an acting Oscar — made comments that some perceived as a slight toward fellow Best Actress nominee Fernanda Torres. Per a translation from Variety, in a Jan. 21 interview with a Brazilian news outlet, Gascón criticized the social media campaigns for films that “diminish” the work of other nominees in order to promote their own. Gascón then mentioned Torres, the Brazilian actress nominated for her work in the film I’m Still Here, and the I’m Still Here team, saying: “I have never, at any point, said anything bad about Fernanda Torres or her movie. However, there are people working with Fernanda Torres tearing me and Emilia Pérez down. That speaks more about their movie than mine.”
Some called into question whether Gascón’s comments violated the academy’s recently updated social media regulations by directly referencing Torres, who, it should be noted, has also been on both sides of public perception, getting praise for becoming the first Brazilian actress to win a Golden Globe for I’m Still Here (Torres’ mother was the first-ever Brazilian Golden Globe nominee), but also receiving flak for a recently resurfaced 17-year-old sketch — for which the actress has since apologized — showing Torres appearing in blackface. However, on Wednesday, in a statement given to Variety, Gascón explained that she wasn’t criticizing Torres or those “directly associated” with her — calling the actress a “wonderful ally” — but rather “toxicity and violent hate speech on social media” more generally. (For now, it seems Gascón’s original comments regarding Torres reportedly do not violate Oscar campaign rules.)
Given how much I’ve seen Gascón’s name in recent headlines, I’m assuming there’s more to this story?
Yes, and I will say that it gets decidedly worse from here. After the comments about Torres were put to bed on Wednesday, things ramped up the very next day when journalist Sarah Hagi alerted the world about Gascón’s history of uncouth tweets in a fairly lengthy X thread of screenshots. Many of the tweets — posted in Spanish, largely from 2020-2021 (though some are more recent) — are too disparaging and offensive to reprint here, but they include sentiments that run the gamut from Islamophobic, xenophobic, and racist to antisemitic. In addition to the incredibly xenophobic and Islamophobic tweets curated by Hagi, another tweet making the rounds shows the actress chiding the 2021 Oscars: “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 the 8M. Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.” Another, referenced in the same Variety report, shows Gascón disparaging George Floyd, referring to him as a “drug addict swindler.” And yet another, referenced in this piece from the New York Times, made racist comments about Chinese people in relation to COVID-19.
Oh god. Did Gascón respond to these resurfaced tweets? Were they taken down?
Later that day, Gascón apologized in a short statement issued by Netflix. In the statement, via NBC, Gascón expressed: “As someone in a marginalized community, I know this suffering all too well and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain.” However, shortly after, the actress deleted her entire X account. In a much lengthier exclusive statement later provided to the Hollywood Reporter, Gascón’s tone had shifted. Per THR, the actress wrote: “I’m sorry, but I can no longer allow this campaign of hate and misinformation to affect me and my family,” adding that she has “been threatened with death, insulted, abused and harassed to the point of exhaustion.” Gascón continues by stating that she has “defended each and every one of the minorities in this world and supported any event against racism, freedom of religion or homophobia,” calling her past opinions “erroneous,” and apologizing to anyone who has “ever felt offended” for them (or would), attributing them to her getting swept up in the toxicity of social media. (One of these days, we’ve got to have a mandatory, society-wide conversation about the right way to apologize.) Most perplexingly, Gascón’s statement ends by blaming some indiscriminate force for allegedly trying to tear her down or “sink” her, writing: “I cannot be responding to every single thing you bring up to try to sink me. But if you want, you can continue attacking me as if I were responsible for hunger and wars in the world.” Gascón asserts that “it is clear that there is something very dark behind it.” She finishes with the phrase “NAM MYOHO RENGE KYO,” which THR reports is a Japanese phrase related to Nichiren Buddhism.
… OK then! I hesitate to ask but: Is that all?
Nope! While Gascón’s torrid 24 or so hours ends there (so far), Jacques Audiard, the Oscar nominated writer-director behind Emilia Pérez, has also landed in the hot seat for some controversial comments he made about the Spanish language in recent months. During an August video interview with the French culture-focused media outlet Konbini, in which the French director was explaining why he wrote Emilia Pérez in Spanish as opposed to English or French, called the language — as roughly translated — one “of modest countries, developing countries, of poor people and migrants.” The resurfaced clip has inspired the ire of online commentators and of actor John Leguizamo, who lambasted Audiard on Threads.
How are people reacting to this onslaught of discoveries?
Despite the fact that this incredibly divisive movie was made and written by a white, cisgender French man, and filmed almost exclusively outside of Mexico, it has somehow become a major awards contender. It is an awards darling that won big at the Golden Globes and leads the pack of Oscar-nominated films with a total of 13 nominations. Naturally, people are finding these comments to be upsetting, enraging, and, if the movie were to rack up more trophies, even more disappointing. But there’s also a streak of irony in the PR disaster that has unfolded; as many have observed, it seems fitting that a film criticized as racist, transphobic (or, at the very least, heavily outdated), and/or just plain ol’ bad would then go on to have so many not-dissimilar issues haunting its awards campaign.
I know that Gascón, Audiard, and the movie are up for Best Actress, Director, and Picture (respectively) at this year’s upcoming Oscars. Does this controversy hurt the chances of them winning? What even were their chances in the first place?
While one would think that this stir is likely to squander some of the favor Emilia Pérez has curried in the eyes of academy voters (who won’t vote for the final winners until mid-February), it is entirely unclear if it will deter a win. After all, in 2019, the similarly polarizing Green Book won Best Picture, even after the film’s screenwriter Nick Vallelonga came under fire for a resurfaced tweet from 2015 in which he disparaged Muslims in a response to Donald Trump.
But Gascón, at least, was already considered least-favored to win Best Actress (with Demi Moore being in the lead), according to the aggregator and awards-prediction site GoldDerby. For Best Director, Audiard trails in second place behind The Brutalist writer-director Brady Corbet, which is also true of the predicted standings for Best Picture. So, while some critics and Yahoo’s algorithm for predicting the Best Picture winner place Emilia Pérez as the favorite to win the big award of the night, others are equally as convinced that, even before the controversy, the award was going to go to The Brutalist anyway. (However, The Brutalist doesn’t come without its own controversy either, as the discovery that A.I. was used to perfect small portions of the actors’ Hungarian dialect ruffled the feathers of many cinephiles.)
In short, everything is still up in the air. Emilia Pérez’s chances could be slimmer because of all this, but it was hard to ascertain what the film’s chances of winning were to begin with. Then again, maybe it will become the next Green Book, which is just the most recent Crash, which is just another rehash of Shakespeare in Love winning over Saving Private Ryan. The academy voters may never learn, but I sincerely hope Gascón and Audiard do.