Karla Sofía Gascón, a cast member in the film Emilia Perez, at the Shangri-La Hotel during the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 8.Chris Pizzello/The Associated Press
Sex, racism and robots: No, that’s not the title of a new Steven Soderbergh film, but rather just a few of the lively topics that have overtaken this year’s Oscars race, the ugliest awards campaign in recent memory. And the mudslinging is set to only get dirtier and nastier as the slouch toward the 97th Academy Awards approaches.
Pick any one of this year’s best picture candidates, and you’re likely to find a film caught in the crosshairs of a controversy either organic or manufactured, major or minor key. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist has been tagged into the increasingly heated debate over the use of artificial intelligence. Sean Baker’s Anora was flagged a few weeks ago for its absence of on-set intimacy co-ordinators, which detractors have attempted to conflate with the sex-work dramedy being an exploitative and problematic work. I’m Still Here star Fernanda Torres has taken time out from reading rapturous reviews of her performance to apologize for wearing blackface in a 17-year-old Brazilian TV comedy sketch. And there have been various attempts to decipher (and then castigate) the Middle East politics of The Substance director Coralie Fargeat.
But easily the most toxic and jaw-dropping heel turn of the year – in modern Oscars history – is the Karla Sofia Gascón situation. Late last week, Canadian journalist Sarah Hagi unearthed a series of racist tweets by Gascon, in which the Oscar-nominated star of awards darling Emilia Pérez (leader of this year’s pack of nominated films, with 13 nods) insulted just about everyone: Muslims, Jews, Koreans and Black Americans. The noxious posts would be bad enough for anyone hoping to make a splash on Hollywood’s biggest night of the year. But Gascón, the first openly trans performer to ever earn an Oscar nomination, is representing a film that is being marketed as the year’s most progressive, open-hearted ode to love and acceptance. If the scandal wasn’t so dispiritingly real, you’d swear it was the work of a hacky showbiz satirist.
Ironically, the one major contender in this year’s race that hasn’t been caught in some kind of controversy is Edward Berger’s papal thriller Conclave, whose plot revolves around the corrupting power of smear campaigns (albeit those spread inside Vatican City, rather than Beverly Hills).
For those with especially long institutional memories, the current traffic jam of PR nightmares recalls the slobbering mid-nineties era of Harvey Weinstein, in which whisper campaigns were the norm. For a glimpse into just how dirty the dogfight could get, pick up a copy of Michael Schulman’s excellent 2023 book Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, which chronicles Weinstein’s bid to trash-talk Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan out of the best picture statuette in favour of Miramax’s Shakespeare in Love.
Yet the current storm doesn’t feel so much like the work of cackling backroom strategists and spin doctors – aren’t they all busy with the Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni brouhaha, any way? – as it does another culprit: the virulent intensity of social media, where fans go to wreak havoc with zero consequence. As The New York Times’ Oscar beat columnist Kyle Buchanan put it the other day (notably, before the Gascón fracas erupted): “It’s funny that Oscar campaigns used to indulge in dirty tricks and whisper campaigns and now they don’t have to, because obsessed stans do all the work.” (A “stan,” for those wondering, is a term for overzealous fans, originating from Eminem’s 2000 single of the same name.)
With a few outraged tweets (or Xs, or what have you), multimillion-dollar awards campaigns can be sunk just like that, the queasy narratives spread and amplified across social media like digital ammunition. Not every situation so neatly fits this mould: Gascón’s tweets were already out there in the world, just waiting to be discovered. (Apparently Netflix’s highly paid awards strategists couldn’t be bothered to do a base-level amount of research.) But many of this season’s controversies have been twisted and torqued as they’ve gone through the online gauntlet. It is not so much whether you – or, more importantly, Academy voters – agree with what is being said. It is how loud and intense the messaging has become.
Lest this all sound like celebrity-centric nonsense, it’s important to note that the awards race – who wins and who gets tarred and feathered on the way out – is a massively big business unto itself. Up until the Gascón story, Netflix had been banking on winning its first best picture Oscar – a coveted milestone that would prove it was finally beating the traditional movie studios at their own game. Now, that heavily valued bragging right is in doubt, if not complete shambles. Similarly, an Oscar triumph for a low-budget picture such as Anora could multiply its revenues exponentially.
Currently, the justifiable outrage directed toward Gascón – whom Netflix seems to be erasing from its Emilia Pérez awards campaign in real time – has drowned out every other film’s perceived issues. But there are still about four more weeks until Oscar night on March 2. Memo to the Conclave team: There is no better time to do a deep dive into, say, Stanley Tucci’s social-media history. Is he really just a lovable fan of Italian food … or is he hiding something more insidious? (Very likely not.) Godspeed to all.
