Emilia Perez: how did the Best Picture contender's Oscar campaign go so off the rails?

Emilia Pérez, the Netflix-distributed musical by director Jacques Audiard about a trans Mexican cartel boss, has four Golden Globes and a record-breaking 13 Oscar nominations – but everybody seems to hate it and the controversy doesn’t stop coming.

Karla Sofia Gascón, who plays the titular role and has been nominated for Best Actress, has been taken off the promotional material for the film. Netflix is reportedly no longer flying her from Spain to Los Angeles to campaign for the Academy Awards at events. Audiard, no stranger to controversy over his film, has said he is now ignoring his star. “I haven’t spoken to her, and I don’t want to,” the director told Deadline magazine.

The film had already managed to offend the entire country of Mexico. Its stars and director can’t seem to stop making statements. The queer community has sacked it off as one big snooze fest. And it continues to get an absolute kicking in the press every time a poor critic has to watch it. But it still had those 13 nominations to campaign for glory on, and Gascón obtaining the first nomination for a trans woman was supposed to be history making.

But now Gascón appears to have put the film’s entire Oscar effort in jeopardy. Last week, Canadian journalist Sarah Hagi resurfaced posts on X made by Gascón in her native Spanish that used shocking anti-Muslim and racist language.

Gascón’s response to the discovery appeared frantic yet un-coordinated. First she made a statement saying she was “deeply sorry to those I have caused pain” . Then she deleted her account on X and called the coverage of her posts “a campaign of hate and misinformation” in an exclusive statement to The Hollywood Reporter (THR).

On Sunday, she booked an hour long interview with CNN en Español – reportedly without involving Netflix – where she attempted to defend her posts calling George Floyd “a drug addict swindler” after he was murdered by police, and said she no longer believed Islam to be “DEEPLY DISGUSTING FOR HUMANITY” because she is friends with “a wonderful woman who is a Muslim”.

Now Netflix, Audiard, and the rest of the cast appear to be in damage control mode. Although, it raises questions over how Netflix allowed it’s relatively unknown star’s social media accounts to remain unsantitised, despite the obvious levels of scrutiny an Oscars campaign would entail.

Plans for Netflix to fund Gascón’s flights and accommodation during the Oscar’s campaign, standard practice for a studio, have reportedly been rescinded. THR is reporting that the star and the distributer are now only communicating via her agent.

Audiard denounced Gascón in his Deadline interview. “It’s very hard for me to think back to the work I did with Karla Sofía, he said, describing her posts as “inexcusable”. “Suddenly you read something that that person has said, things that are absolutely hateful and worthy of being hated, of course that relationship is affected.”

Zoë Saldaña, nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Emilia Pérez, also addressed the scandal at a recent Q&A. “It makes me really sad,” she said. “I don’t have any tolerance for any negative rhetoric towards people of any group.”

Saldaña’s own past controversy has also resurfaced during her Oscars campaign. In 2012 she faced backlash for wearing dark makeup and prosthetics to play the Black artist Nina Simone in a biopic (Saldaña is light skinned and of Puerto Rican, Dominican and Haitian descent). “I should have never played Nina,” the actress said in a tearful Instagram livestream in 2020.

The terrible tweets and crisis communications are just the cherry on top of the beleaguered campaign. Gascón previously stirred up trouble last week for her comments about Fernanda Torres, who is also nominated in the Best Actress category. Gascón said she had observed “many people working around Fernanda Torres who talk badly about me, and Emilia Pérez”.

There was speculation that this comment could have been in contravention of the Academy’s rules about disparaging remarks about other nominees, but Gascón was careful to praise Torres in the original interview and her later clarifying statement.

Even before the awards campaign began in earnest, the film was widely viewed as deeply problematic. One of the leading complaints is its treatment of its Mexican setting, plot, and janky accent work. Audiard, who doesn’t speak Spanish, shot most of the film in France and allegedly re-wrote the script to hand-wave away why none of the non-Mexican cast had the right accent.

Mexican viewers have been particularly upset by the film’s handling of the cartel storyline. Violence from Mexico’s drug wars has seen 350,000 people murdered or disappeared. Gascón’s Emilia is a cartel boss that fakes their own death and transitions, then attempts to atone for their violent past by setting up a nonprofit to identify the bodies of missing Mexicans. There’s a song about it. It’s a wildly insensitive handling of a plot point that’s pretty deranged to begin with.

Mexican artists were so outraged at the stereotyping of their culture in Emilia Pérez they created a parody musical poking fun at Audiard’s native France. Trans filmmaker Camila Aurora created Johanne Sacreblu “The Musical”: a tribute to Emilia Pérez, which features a cast wearing stripey T-shirts and fake moustaches with comedy props such as rats, cigarettes, and glasses of red wine. The plot follows a forbidden romance between the trans heirs to rival croissant and baguette empires. Héctor Guillén, a Mexican screenwriter involved in Johanne Sacreblu called Emilia Pérez as “racist Eurocentric mockery”.

The supposed trans representation in the film has also fallen flat, partly because the conversation has moved on, and partly because the plot’s handling of it is so poor.

Not only does Emilia Pérez include a bizarre song about sex change operations, Emilia’s changing body on hormones is treated as a jumpscare, and her transition is framed as a way to escape the crimes she committed while running the cartel. LGBTQ advocates GLAAD called the film a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman” and a “step backward for trans representation”.

Also, the representation-matters train has pretty much run out of steam.

Remember when the Danish Girl got four Oscar nominations in 2016? Everyone was rightly outraged that Eddie Redmayne, a cis straight dude, played the role of a famous trans women from history. Thankfully Redmayne didn’t win Best Actor, and has admitted in hindsight that his casting was a “mistake”.

While Emilia Perez got it right by casting a trans woman for the titular role, it appears it may have got everything wrong.

There are other queer and trans actors and directors doing Oscars-worthy work in Hollywood currently. It’s telling that hugely well-received films such as Queer and I Saw the TV Glow were snubbed in favour of this hot mess of a movie.