The pine over racist and anti-Muslim tweets From best actress nominated Karla Sofía Gascón has left the Oscar campaign for Gascón and her film, “Emilia Pérez,” Poorly injured and maybe even devastated, but there are also reasons to believe that the film can take less of a hit than its star.
Given this year’s calendar for the award season, “Emilia Pérez” can conceivable weather storm and do what it has done so far this season: Win Awards even though it is the lowest ranked by the best image nominated on Metacritic, and despite months of attacks of Social media that think it lacks different fronts.
With a strategy for isolation and rejection, which already started with co -star Zoe Saldañas Comments That she “(not) has no tolerance for any negative rhetoric towards people in any group”, Netflix will make her job cut out to distance the film from her star, and from the person who served as the public face of ” Emilia Pérez ”in the Press Room in the Golden Globes, where it won four awards.
“She would never win,” said a strategist that is not a stranger to the Oscar accounts. “The question is how much it will hurt the movie.”
Making things even more difficult: The best picture race of the year is exceptionally narrow, with “Emilia Pérez” which seems to be a narrow Frontrunner but “The Brutalist”, “Anora”, “Wicked” has trails to victory.
The academy’s ranked choice of voting systems rewards films that appear in no. 2 and 3 places on a large number of votes, and everything that nods a movie that is lower on the polls of even a small proportion of voters can be risky.
But it is not always fatal. Last time something this happened was six years ago, when the movie was “Green Book” and offensive comments had come from one of its writers and producers, Nick Vallelonga. At that time, the furrow did not stop: Universal Pictures kept Vallelonga outside the campaign track in recent months and the film won the best picture, best supportive actor and best original script.
Still, the furrow over “Emilia Pérez” will be more difficult to move away so easily, as there is more than the only tweet that Vallelonga sent the backup of Donald Trump’s wrong statement that Muslims in New Jersey cheered the world trade on 9/11.
It started with a Brazilian television interview where Gascón accused people close to “I’m still here” star Fernanda Torres, a colleague’s best actress nominated, had taken her on social media. This was reported and accompanied by suggestions that Gascon’s comments violated the Oscar campaign rules – a unfounded Fee, as the academy quickly pointed out.
But what could have been dismissed as a social media attempt to take down a movie that had become standard frontunner turned out to be much more than that, since Gascón’s social media account from the time before she made “Emilia Pérez” included anti-Muslim and anti-wax posts which triggered upset when they circulated.
If her best actress campaign is in Tatters now, you can claim that it was in Taters as soon as Demi Moore went off the scene at Golden Globes after winning the best actress in a musical or comedy and making a famous and moving speech generally.
Netflix, who acquired the film after his debut at the Cannes Film Festival, where Gascón and three other actresses shared the best actress, have not addressed if it did research on the social media story about its then unknown star. Tempo on film festival acquisitions for hot titles can make it difficult, but the company had the film at the end of May. It is months before its award campaign would start in earnest, months where investigation, scrub and media education would probably have taken place.
The question now is how this will hurt the movie with voters. The first three major awards that come up are Critics Choice Awards on February 7 and Director Guild Awards and Producers Guild Awards on February 8. Screen Actors Guild follows February 23 and Oscars on March 2.
The critic’s electoral vote ended on January 10, so there is no chance for this week’s revelations to influence the results. Producers Guild Balloting opened on January 13 and ended on Thursday, which meant that the only voters who could change were the ones who chose to vote on the last day. The directors Guild voting has been going on for more than three weeks and have a week left, time for some late voters to change if they believe that Gascón’s comments should affect Jacques Audiard’s chances.
Voting for Sag Awards, where Gascón is nominated for best actress, opened two weeks ago, on January 15, but continues for another three weeks, which means that most voters have not yet thrown votes. And the Oscar vote will not start until February 11.
History suggests that controversy with social media does not register much with Oscar voters: “Emilia Pérez,” after all, got more nominations than any other movie at a time when it had been hit online for a number of perceived sins, including the French director Audiard did It in France instead of Mexico and used a role of largely non-Mexican actors (with accents who were in many cases Dodgy against mother tongue), and that it used derogatory Mexican stereotypes in its treatment of a transgender character.
But this furrow has moved far beyond social media, to mainstream stores that can have more impact on voters. For Netflix, Road Forward will probably mean that Gascón is scarce at the campaign circle: She will be at Critics Choice Awards as nominated on February 7 at The Producers Guild Awards as presenter on February 8 and at Santa Santa as Santa as Santa Barbara International Film Festival as One of the Honores on a “Virtuosos” panel on February 9. Nobody comments yet if she will show up, but it would hardly be a surprise if she was no show at all of these events.
At the same time, it is inevitable that other members of the “Emilia Pérez” team make their own statements that reject her comments on social media; If they do not, every appearance they make will be cut by questions about Gascón.
In a very narrow Oscar race, the controversy who consumed “Emilia Pérez” could come back to kill it on March 2 – or they could have faded or settled on Gascón.
At the end of November, Gascón talked to Thewrap for the cover of an Oscar magazine. When asked about the effect that “Emilia Pérez” could have in a time with a large division over transgender people, she offered a prediction that now seems both prophetic and self -deception.
“It won’t help me personally, because I will be a goal,” she said. “But I’m used to it, because everywhere in the world it is the same. There are people who hate others just for existing, and I think it is quite boring and pitiful that people like it win the choice. What really should happen is that all pages should go together, left or right or which label you want to use and be clear about our rights and obligations as people. And do not remove rights or impose a group of people because they have a different skin color or other sexuality.
“Honestly, I expect the attacks to come. I’m ready for it. “
