I wrote about Emilia Perez here but if you missed it previously here's the short version of the scandal engulfing Hollywood like a wildfire. Emilia Perez is a musical about a drug kingpin who decides to fake his death and become a trans woman with a brand new life.
Most people had never heard of the film (it's on Netflix) and those who had didn't like it (it currently has an 18% audience rating at Rotten Tomatoes), but Academy Award members nominated it for 13 Oscars suggesting it's one of the greatest films ever made.
For a while it seemed to be the favorite to potentially sweep this year's major awards until a left-wing journalist in Canada started looking at old tweets written by Karla Sofía Gascón, the trans woman star of the film currently nominated for best actress, and discovered all sorts of problematic comments.
In one of the posts on X, which were published in Spanish and shared in screenshots by the journalist Sarah Hagi, Gascón wrote that Islam was “becoming a hotbed of infection for humanity that urgently needs to be cured.” In another, she wrote that “the religion is INCOMPATIBLE with Western values.”
Gascón also described [George] Floyd as a “drug-addicted con artist” in a 2020 post criticizing people who were protesting his deadly arrest by police officers. Later that year, during the coronavirus pandemic, she wrote that “the Chinese vaccine, in addition to the mandatory chip, comes with two spring rolls.”
It's actually difficult to find details of what Gascon said because none of the outlets writing about this story want to include the tweets but here's a sample.
this is all from the star of a movie that is campaigning on its progressive values, you really gotta laugh. stuff like this doesn’t get flagged because you can say whatever you want about muslims, it’s never considered racist. again, this isn’t even all of them pic.twitter.com/Cq8rQaiSmm
— sarah hagi (@KindaHagi) January 30, 2025
So the trans star of this Oscar nominated movie was pretty much a right-wing, anti-Islamist. This has been like a bomb going off in Hollywood. The Wrap reports that fingers are being pointed in every direction. Everyone is scrambling to get out of the blast zone created by these tweets. No one wants to take responsibility.
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 shit 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.
All non-approved opinions normally get screened out way before this point in Hollywood, but since they weren't Gascon is being dropped from the pre-Oscar preliminaries taking place this week. In fact, Gascon won't be coming to Hollywood at all.
...given the massive controversy that has engulfed Gascón in recent days regarding commentary that she posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) — posts about which Gascón has, in recent days, been regularly writing on social media and discussing in interviews, without consultation or coordination with Netflix, which owns Emilia Pérez’s distribution rights in the United States, Canada and the UK — The Hollywood Reporter has learned that she will not be coming to town at all.
And because no one wants to touch the unclean trans person, Karla Sofía Gascón is out there flailing through interview after interview, drawing even more attention to this Hollywood PR disaster.
Embattled Emilia Pérez star and Oscar nominee Karla Sofía Gascón appeared in an hour-long, unauthorized CNN en Español interview Sunday morning, in which she broke down in tears and ranted at various points about her resurfaced racist and Islamophobic tweets.
Initially reiterating many of the same points in her Instagram apology posted yesterday, Gascón reiterated that she is “not racist” and offered her “most sincere apologies to all the people who may have felt offended for the way I express myself in my past, in my present and in my future.”
She continued later: “I believe I have been judged, I have been convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned without a trial and without the option to defend myself.”
Deadline has confirmed that Netflix was not involved in setting up the CNN interview and was not aware it was taking place.
Everyone is a victim in Hollywood or wants to be one, so of course Gascon is making herself out to be a victim and hoping that's the quickest path to redemption. And that may be the most ironic part of all of this. This is a movie about a murderous cartel kingpin who fakes their death and starts a new life. It's trans identity as a metaphor for spiritual rebirth, i.e. having your past sins washed away. This is the message Academy voters found so profound that they nominated it for all the awards.
But they clearly don't believe a word of it. Not really.
The star of the film wasn't a cartel kingpin. Gascon didn't murder her rivals to spread addictive poison for cash. This is about some intemperate tweets. And Hollywood's only response is to disown, to shun, to cancel, to run away and generally try to blame someone for letting this skunk into their leftist garden party. It's funny but it's also sad. Not one of them believes in redemption because wokeness has no space for it. They are hypocrites and cowards, the whole lot of them.
We could see the ultimately proof of that on March 2 when the Oscars ceremony is held at the Dolby Theater on Hollywood Blvd. Why? Because the voting for these awards is already over. It has been over for more than two weeks. The winners have already been chosen, they just haven't been revealed.
So we might actually see a best actress award given to a trans person who isn't present to collect it because they've been completely canceled by the same people who voted to award it to them. Talk about fantasy colliding with reality. Some sins are unforgiveable even for people at the top of the pyramid of oppression. That's the real message Hollywood is sending this year, not the nonsense in Emilia Perez.
