How Karla Sofia Gascón turned a historic Oscars first into a historic Oscars nightmare

https://www.datalounge.com/thread/35252249-how-karla-sofia-gasc%C3%B3n-turned-a-historic-oscars-first-into-a-historic-oscars-nightmare

Karla Sofia Gascón has put Oscar voters between a historic first and a hard place.

When she received a nomination for best actress in a leading role for her work in Netflix’s film “Emilia Pérez,” Gascón became not only the first out transgender person to be nominated for an acting award, but also the odds-on favorite. With 13 nods, including for picture, international feature and director, “Emilia Pérez” received more nominations than any other film this year.

Though criticized by LGBTQ viewers for its depiction of the trans experience and by Mexican viewers for a stereotypical portrait of the country, “Emilia Pérez” seemed an easy fit for a film academy that has spent years growing and diversifying its membership to better mirror the world with its myriad stories and artists.

So much so that historic firsts have become a looked-for feature of the Oscar telecast.

But Gascón, it turns out, is not the model of progressive politics and aspirational representation that Netflix and many academy members assumed she would be. Recently resurfaced racist, anti-Muslim and openly anti-diversity tweets have upended the Oscar campaign not just for Gascón but for every “Emilia Pérez” nominee.

She quickly apologized for the tweets in question (and denied writing one that slammed her co-star Selena Gomez altogether), saying, among other things, that she had in the past used social media as “a diary,” that her views about Muslims have evolved, that the sentiments had been mischaracterized or taken out of context, and that she regrets any pain her words might have caused.

She also repeatedly intimated that the appearance of the tweets was part of a smear campaign. Her recent interview with CNN en Español was by turns contrite, combative and self-pitying. “I believe I have been judged,” she said. “I have been convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned without a trial and without the option to defend myself.”

Since that interview, which was not authorized by Netflix, the streamer has reportedly all but shut down Gascón’s awards campaign. According to the Hollywood Reporter, she will no longer be attending the AFI Awards, the Critics Choice Awards, the Producers Guild Awards (at which she was scheduled to be a presenter) or the Santa Barbara Film Festival. She has already been removed from some digital FYC advertising for the film.

The obvious question is why Netflix, with its extensive awards team, social media savvy and budget, did not deal with Gascón’s tweets long before the Oscar race began. And the answer appears to be that they did not think it was necessary. That as a trans woman, Gascón would, as she has since said, understand the difficulties faced by minorities and not go out of her way to exacerbate them.

But being trans is an issue of personal identity, not a political belief system; fighting for one’s own right to live an authentic life does not automatically translate to one wider set of beliefs or another. To assume that trans women and men are monolithic in their views, or incapable of holding bigoted beliefs, is absurd. Karla Sofia Gascón is a person, not a political template.

She and “Emilia Pérez” were always going to put this Oscar race on the front lines of the culture war, where divisions over gender — its reality, roles and rights — lead to many of the biggest battles. But support for the film, which might have been seen as a form of pushback against President Trump’s attempts to curtail transgender rights, has suddenly become something else entirely.

With its controversies over artificial intelligence (“The Brutalist”), blackface (Fernanda Torres of “I’m Still Here”) and intimacy coordinators (“Anora”), this Oscar season has been compared to the pontifical politics of “Conclave.”

Based on the Robert Harris novel, “Conclave” explores the difference between the actual and the symbolic. A series of cardinals, each representing a starkly different view of the Church, become front-runners — only to have their conflicting and very human failings exposed. In the end, a long-shot candidate is chosen in part because he “exists between certainties.”

If she has done nothing else, Gascón has exposed the space that exists between our current “certainties.”

If she were cisgender, she might expect the “anti-woke” mob, including Trump and Elon Musk, to come to her defense, to disparage Hollywood liberals for “canceling” a performer whose work they had just honored because she publicly aired views they find objectionable. But conservative forces have too thoroughly coalesced around transphobia to make that possible.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2025-02-04/karla-sofia-gascon-tweets-oscars-eemilia-perez-column