It didn’t take long for the finger-pointing to begin in the wake of the spectacular implosion of Karla Sofía Gascón’s Oscar campaign for Best Actress in “Emilia Pérez” after an archive of her racist tweets insulting Blacks, Muslims and Jews came to light.
The incident – like a wildfire that incinerated her Oscar hopes in the course of a day last week — threatened to create a secondary burn zone among the publicists and marketers who run awards campaigns, and who found themselves facing accusations of negative campaigning not seen for many years.
Said one awards consultant who summed up the general gossip: “It’s obviously a smear campaign, but what do I know?”
Hollywood is nothing if not clubby, and Oscar campaigns can turn toxic on a dime.
This furor on the eve of Oscar voting, which begins on Feb. 11, called to mind the days when Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Katzenberg went toe to toe over “Shakespeare in Love” and “Saving Private Ryan” in 1998, “The Cider House Rules” and “American Beauty” the next year, or when attacks on “A Beautiful Mind” and “The Hurt Locker” surfaced late in those films’ (successful) Oscar campaigns.
This year “Emilia Pérez” has been the frontrunner with 13 nominations, but the race has been considered an open field with strong contenders including “Conclave,” “Wicked,” “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” “A Complete Unknown” and even a dark horse contender in the Brazilian drama “I’m Still Here.”
There were more questions than answers, to be sure. Who failed to vet Gascón’s social media history? How did the years-old, ugly sentiments get resurfaced just now, at the cusp of Oscar voting? Was this deliberate sabotage? Everyone wanted to find a person, or a reason, to blame for the harsh turn in tone fed by Gascón’s own responses and — as usual — a raging social media mob.
And most pressing: what should be done now?
Gascón’s past opinions on matters from George Floyd to Muslims in Europe, and her ongoing half-apologies through the weekend, made an embarrassing mess for Netflix’s awards team. It brought scrutiny to the actress’ high-level PR team at the Lede Company and her agent at UTA, industry veteran Jeremy Barber, and swung a spotlight onto rival awards consultants who became the subject of suspicion because – how could this have come out of nowhere?
“This stuff is warfare,” said an individual close to the mess. “One of the ways you move things forward is by tearing people down … They push this s–t forward. This is their job. They whisper to this and that one. You fan the fires.”
Two awards insiders told TheWrap that Netflix awards chief Lisa Taback had gotten personal threats and been under attack by online bots since the middle of last week, requiring a cybersecurity team to get involved. Taback and Netflix declined to comment. UTA also declined to comment.
TheWrap spoke to the parties who were both pointing fingers and having fingers pointed at them, only to learn that no one was willing to take responsibility for the black eye. A Netflix insider said that two senior publicists from the high-powered Lede Company, Alexandra Crotin and Marisa Martins, had been hired to guide Gascón through awards season and should have vetted her social media. Crotin and Martins declined to comment. A spokesperson for Netflix denied this was true.
An insider with knowledge of their thinking said that they were hired in September, several months after Netflix acquired the film after the Cannes Film Festival, and that Netflix should have vetted Gascón’s social media accounts.
Another insider close to the film agreed that as Gascón and the film got traction through awards season, “somewhere somebody probably should have done some vetting,” and that there would have been a path to manage her past remarks.
It’s too late for that.
Gascón herself seemed to not quite realize that her campaign was toast. On Saturday, she continued to offer up an odd mix of apology, self-pity and defiance, blaming unspecified others in a dramatic post on Instagram: “I recognize, through tears, that they’ve already won. They’ve achieved their goal: to stain, with lies or things taken out of context, my existence. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not racist.” (And, yes, she did then say that one of her closest friends is a Muslim.)
On Sunday she did it again, sobbing in an hour-long interview with CNN en Español saying much the same thing.
It was clear through the weekend that no one was “managing” Gascón and the situation, and a scheduled call between the actress and her team did not take place, according to a knowledgeable insider.
Another awards insider at Netflix said that they had washed their hands of the Spanish actress and moved on to try and firewall the integrity of the rest of the nominees including Zoe Saldaña and director Jacques Audiard.
Saldaña condemned Gascón’s statements calling for Muslims to be banned from Europe and dismissing George Floyd, saying “I don’t support it” during a Q&A in London on Friday.
Rival awards consultants vehemently denied any involvement in the matter, but were skeptical that freelance journalist Sarah Hagi found the past tweets on her own last Wednesday, although Hagi has said that that is exactly what happened.
One of the consultants said that the desire to point fingers at other films in competition for awards made no sense because Gascón was never going to win.
This consultant has spoken to many AMPAS members and is convinced that “Emilia Pérez” was never going to win Best Picture either, observing: “Why would anyone go after her or that film when no Academy member has even told me they liked it, let alone loved it?”
But three of the consultants who spoke to TheWrap said, based on their experience rather than evidence, the negative attacks were probably intentional. One theory is that it came out of Brazil, and that the initial reports of Gascón claiming that Fernanda Torres’ camp was badmouthing her were spread by right-wing sources hoping to discredit Torres and the film.
“I’m Still Here” is hated by the far right in Brazil because it criticizes the right-wing military dictatorship of the ’60s and ’70s. (Then again, the right would have no reason to promote Gascón’s past tweets, because those hurt her and help Torres.)
A second awards consultant who represents a rival contender concluded that it was driven by Brazilian fans of Torres and the movie, who flooded the comments section of the Academy’s livestream on nominations morning and have been very active ever since.
But the offensive nature of Gascón’s tweets were, as several pointed out, the baseline cause for the campaign’s implosion. Anyone could read them and draw their own conclusion. Freelance journalist Sarah Hagi posted screenshots of several tweets Gascón published between 2020 and 2021 attacking Muslims, including one of a Muslim man weeping.
“New attack in France, decapitated people in Nice by one of the retarded people that follow Allah,” Gascón wrote in Spanish.. “How many times are we going to have to expel these madmen from Europe to realize that their religion is INCOMPATIBLE with Western values? We do not learn.”
The since-deleted tweets also expressed anti-vaccination views, disparaged George Floyd as a “hustler” and complained about previous Oscars ceremonies for being too woke. “I honestly think very few people really cared about George Floyd. He was a drug addict and a scammer,” Gascón wrote after Floyd was killed by a police officer in full view of witnesses. “But after his death has served once again to highlight that there are people who still think Black monkeys have no rights and who consider police are killers. They are so wrong.”
In 2018 she tweeted this about Hitler: “This is the same old story, ‘Black slaves and women go to the kitchen.’ It’s my opinion and it should be respected,” she wrote. “I do not understand why everyone is making a world war against Hitler, he simply had his opinion of the Jews. Well, that’s how the world works.”
The Muslim Public Affairs Council issued a statement to TheWrap calling Gascón’s comments “hurtful, offensive and shocking.”
And Gascón’s inability to filter herself during awards season interviews hasn’t helped.
All season, “Emilia Pérez” has been one of the most widely-attacked of the Oscar contenders on social media, with critics also singling out French director Audiard’s decision to shoot the film in France and use a largely non-Mexican cast, despite the fact that the film about a transgender drug lord is set in Mexico and has largely Mexican characters.
An individual with knowledge of the “Emilia Pérez” campaign said: “Right now, everyone is trying to figure out what to do. There isn’t an easy answer. She is the first trans actress to be nominated … It’s not uncomplicated.”
