There’s a Elementary Explanation for the Emilia Pérez Scandal

Until just a few days ago, Oscar campaign season was rollicking along with a very unconventional frontrunner leading the charge: Emilia Pérez, a Spanish-language musical from France about a trans drug kingpin’s unlikely second act. The film was a hit at Cannes last May, where Netflix bought distribution rights and began the challenging work of positioning this left-of-center movie as a viable competitor to more traditionally awards-friendly films like The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, and Conclave.

By some miracle, it worked. Even though Emilia Pérez faced the sturdy headwinds of backlash—from those who decried the film’s depiction of current Mexico, from those who said its messaging about trans identity was totally bungled—it skipped from festival to festival, picking up ever more steam on the way to nearly tying an Oscar nominations record. (It got 13, just shy of All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land’s 14.) It was a pretty impressive feat, an exemplar of Netflix’s awards strategy savvy and of a changing Academy’s willingness to think more expansively about what an Oscar movie can be.

And then it seemed to all come crashing down last week, when X (formerly Twitter) users unearthed senior (but not really that senior at all) posts from the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón, the first openly trans actor to receive an Oscar nomination. The tweets, and there are many of them, are varied and immense in their offense, but the majority of them target Muslim people, verging on Great Replacement theory white nationalism. Gascón’s response to the scandal has been messy, let’s say—a soup of tearful half-apologies that have really only made the problem worse.

So what happened here, beyond a middle-aged person being awful on social media, which is no recent occurrence? From the most cynical, practical standpoint, this was a catastrophic failure of an otherwise well-run Netflix machine. It’s boggling that in the nearly nine months since Emilia Pérez premiered at Cannes and made an overnight star of Gascón, no one at Netflix thought to look into her quite vigorous social media presence. Not that Netflix, nor any other distributor, ought to be inherently suspicious of their talent—but the company probably should have done at least little vetting of the person they were going to put at the center of a very high-priced campaign, no less for a movie that has been fending off detractors (many of them with wholly justifiable complaints) for months now.

That’s an unforced error of the kind we rarely see in the awards race. Deleting Gascón’s posts wouldn’t have solved the problem of her beliefs, but it would have at least helped protect the larger film—and the work of the other people who helped make it, who are all now tarnished by association. That’s an awfully clumsy way to handle an asset, and a sign that Netflix was maybe too caught up in the Emilia Pérez groundswell to consider the idea that something about the film may not be wholly triumphant and uplifting.

Which is maybe the real problem here. Much hay has been made about Gascón’s groundbreaking presence in the Oscar race, and for good reason—especially at a time when trans rights are so hideously under attack around the world. In a vacuum, Gascón is an emblem of a major cultural shift—representing progress that Netflix should be proud of, and that the streamer was not wrong to highlight as they toured the film around to festivals and guild screenings.

But there is something discomfiting about the way Netflix seemingly assumed that because Gascón is a pioneer of one progressive cause, she must then be on the right side of all others. A source told Variety as much in a story investigating what exactly went wrong here: “She does not meet the requirements of somebody who would normally be vulnerable to posting toxic commentary because she’s part of the LGBTQ+ community. She doesn’t fit the profile because she, herself, is part of a protected class.”

That’s a strangely patronizing and yet terribly familiar attitude, a more grievous example of a longstanding Hollywood phenomenon. Gascón was, perhaps, narrowly viewed as only an emblem—not as a full person possessed of the complexities, be they good or bad, that come with that fullness. It’s one thing to assume the best of people; in general, that’s probably the healthiest way to move through the world. But it’s another to market someone based solely on one marker of their identity, figuring that’s enough. It turns out that Netflix didn’t know Gascón’s story at all, despite months of championing it. 

This is an extreme version of Hollywood’s recent insistence that every queer celebrity is an amazing icon diva hero, simply because they are queer and celebrated. Anyone who has rolled their eyes at straight Hollywood’s blind veneration of, say, some Queer Eye hosts probably sees something similar in the way Gascón has been handled; proudly (and somewhat condescendingly) held up as a symbol of an industry’s virtue, but not actually understood.

So this was a mechanical failure—why at no point since last May was a Spanish-speaking Netflix employee not dispatched to sift through the very-online Gascón’s tweets? And it serves as another instructive moment in Hollywood’s ongoing struggle to be inclusive. Whether or not the Emilia Pérez campaign is now dead (the Academy doesn’t always pay attention to such controversy; they could just block it all out and proceed like normal), we can probably assume that distributors and campaigners will be a lot more exact in their research going forward. And, hopefully, more thoughtful about installing one fallible person as the representative of so many.