There is still some time before the Oscars are announced, but one candidate seems to have withdrawn from the competition for the little golden man in advance. Karla Sofía Gascón, the star of the movie "Emilia Pérez", has become the target of public criticism due to a series of scandals that have recently exposed her reputation.
Accusing rival teams of malicious slander
Just about a week ago, Carla Sofia Gascon was still a favorite for many people in the competition for this year's Best Actress. After all, she had previously won the Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival and the Best Actress at the European Film Awards, and was nominated for important awards such as the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the British Academy Film Awards, and the French Cesar Awards. Although she lost to Fernanda Torres, the heroine of the Brazilian film "I'm Still Here", in the Golden Globe Awards, as the first transgender actress to be nominated in Oscar history, and considering that the new US President Trump restored binary gender after taking office, it is generally predicted that the Oscar judges are likely to vote for her to express their dissatisfaction with the US government's suppression of sexual minorities.
Gascón at the European Film Awards
Last weekend, Fernanda Torres was severely criticized for a performance in which she wore blackface 17 years ago, forcing her to apologize in the hope of calming down the storm as soon as possible. Just when the outside world thought that the storm was about to pass, Carla Sofia Gascón's remarks in an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo suddenly became the focus of public attention.
On January 28th, local time, Brazilian media released this interview video, in which Gascón named and condemned the people around Fernanda Torres for maliciously slandering her and her starring role in "Emilia Perez". "I don't like the practice of sending social media teams to slander other people's works. It will not benefit anyone. If you want your own work to stand out, it doesn't mean you have to slander other people's work. You will never see me speak ill of Fernanda Torres and her work, but now I see many people who work with her saying bad things about me and "Emilia Perez". I believe that everyone has sharp eyes and can tell who is right and who is wrong."
Later, when asked if he felt sorry for losing the Golden Globe to his opponent, Gascón said that he was very happy for Fernanda Torres and thought she was an excellent actress, but he also admitted that due to time constraints, he has not watched "I'm Still Here" yet. "This is not a competition, it's just that some people like or dislike your work. If she wins the Oscar in the end, it's a good thing; if it's me, the same thing will happen."
In this era of social media, where geography and language no longer constitute any barriers, the interview video soon became a hot topic on American social media, with some supporting Gascón's voice, others criticizing her for making up stories, and some pointing out that the Oscars have long prohibited public criticism of competitors, and Gascón's remarks may have caused her to lose her candidacy for the Oscars due to violation of fair competition regulations.
On January 29, Gascón quickly wrote a clarification on social media, emphasizing that she had never attacked Torres or anyone "directly related" to "I'm Still Here." "I'm a big fan of Fernanda Torres. Although I've only known her for a few months, it's great to know her. She has always been a good ally of mine, and those around her have given me great support." She then added that her original intention in the interview with Brazilian media was to say, "There is a lot of toxic and violent hate speech on social media, and unfortunately, I am still experiencing it now."
Soon, another person involved, Torres, also spoke out publicly to release goodwill. She asked her fans to love everyone and said that she also admired Gascón. "Everyone deserves our love, let's not fuel the hatred on the Internet. I want to say, Carla Sofia Gascón, I love you forever, you are a generous and talented woman who deserves the love of all of us."
Angry at the Heaven, Angry at the Earth, Angry at the People
If the above incidents were to end here, it would probably be just a minor episode in the final stage of this year's Oscars. In order to win the highest honor of film awards, each film company will hire a public relations team to launch a publicity war, and using the huge communication power of social media to create topics is one of the required courses in the Oscars war in recent years. It is normal to create some small sparks between competitors like this. It is hard to say that there is no such force behind the exposure of "Brutalist" using artificial intelligence and the blackface video of the heroine of "I'm Still Here".
However, on January 30, the situation suddenly changed. Sarah Hagi, a Somali-American freelance writer from Canada, spent a lot of time looking through all of Gascón's social media posts since 2016 and pointed out that there were a lot of cynical and controversial remarks. The screenshots compiled by Sarah Hagi quickly spread through social media. In these texts, the Spanish-born writer did not care about the so-called political correctness of Western society at all, and criticized the Muslim community and the American black community.
For example, Gascón posted two posts in 2020, "Are you kidding me? Is it my misunderstanding? Why are there more and more Muslims in Spain?" and "Every time I pick up my daughter from school, I see more and more women covering their hair and their skirts dragging down to their heels. Maybe next year our school's foreign language classes will teach Arabic instead of English." Later, she even posted a post suggesting that Europe ban Islam altogether on the grounds that Islam "goes against European values and violates human rights." In another post, her anger seemed to extend to other religions: "I'm really fed up with this shit, Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, and all the damn beliefs of idiots who violate human rights."
Even the Oscars were the target of her criticism. After the 2021 Oscars ceremony, she posted: "The Oscars are becoming more and more like an exclusive film festival for independent films and protest films. I don’t know whether I’m watching an African-American Korean Film Festival or a big demonstration for Black Lives Matter. Even without mentioning this, this is also an ugly party."
Criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement is also concentrated in another long post in Spanish: "Let me get this straight. This guy tried to use counterfeit money to get by after taking methamphetamine, and then met an idiot policeman who didn't know the limits and accidentally killed him in the process of arresting him. He also ruined the lives of his family and those colleagues, but turned the fake money liar into a martyr hero. I believe that before the incident, few people actually cared about George Floyd, the drug addict, but his death once again highlighted that there are still some people who think that black people are just a group of monkeys and deserve to have no human rights, and there are also some people who still think that all police are murderers. I want to say that both sides are wrong."
Gascón even has complaints about her own sexual minority group. She wrote in an old post: "Those transgender and LGBT clowns who only know how to follow the reactionary remarks of the extreme right are really hurting others and themselves. They remind me of those black people who whipped their black brothers and forced them to pick cotton. What a son of a bitch."
After the incident was exposed, except for a few people who praised Gascón for her courage to speak out, the vast majority of netizens criticized her for being too narrow-minded and extreme, especially because she was enjoying the benefits of being a member of a disadvantaged group, but had no sympathy for minorities. The Muslim Public Affairs Council, a US nonprofit organization, even issued a public statement, saying that her remarks were "extremely hurtful and offensive, especially since she herself is a member of a disadvantaged community, which is even more shocking." In the Hollywood industry, everyone is also wondering why Netflix, as the distributor of the film, can spend a lot of money on "Oscar-winning" publicity, but neglected the actor's social media management, and no one reviewed Gascón's posting record in advance.
However, Gascón, who had been in the entertainment industry for more than 20 years and had filmed some movies and TV shows in her native Spain, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, was basically an unknown marginal figure. Therefore, each of her posts on social media had only a few hundred views and a few single-digit likes. In addition, her posts at that time were all written in Spanish, so if you didn't deliberately search with the keywords "Muslim" and "black", perhaps no one would have discovered her past extreme remarks.
Shut down social media and apologize
After 10 a.m. on January 30, Gascón began deleting old posts on her social media; on the morning of January 31, her social media account was completely closed, which seemed to mean that the actress had withdrawn from the remaining promotional schedule of "Emilia Perez". While closing her account, she also issued an apology letter through the distributor Netflix platform: "I want to apologize to everyone for the hurtful words I posted on social media. As a member of a marginalized group, I actually understand the pain of being hurt. So I deeply apologize to those who have been hurt by my posts. I have been fighting for a better world all my life, and I believe that light will always defeat darkness."
However, such an apology is not very sincere in the eyes of most people. The light and dark are just a repetition of her Golden Globe acceptance speech, and it makes people doubt what the dark and light she is talking about are. So far, Gascón's chances of winning an Oscar are probably gone, and the only suspense left is the Oscar prospects of "Emilia Perez".
Carla Sofia Gascon (center) plays a drug lord who becomes a woman in "Amelia Perez"
Judging from past situations, Oscar judges have never paid much attention to controversies on social media. In most cases, they prefer to make judgments based on the quality of the work itself. After all, "Emilia Perez" has been one of the most controversial works this year from the beginning, especially on the Internet, and has been criticized in various ways, including that the film is clearly about Mexico, but it was shot entirely in France, and the actors used are almost all non-Mexican, and the Mexican Spanish accents are not correct at all, and there are many stereotypes that devalue Mexicans in the plot. Even a past interview video of director Jacques Audiard has been re-turned. He said in his native French: "Spanish is the language of small countries, developing countries, poor people and immigrants." Despite this, the Oscar judges still gave the film 13 nominations, setting a new record for the most nominations for non-English films.
On the evening of January 31, Cara Sofia Gascón, who had quit social media, wrote to The Hollywood Reporter, seemingly to make a final defense for herself. "I have received all kinds of death threats, insults, abuse and harassment, and I am exhausted. If you want, you can continue to attack me as if all the hunger and war in the world are caused by me." She wrote in the article. According to her, her social media posts have always been used by her "as diaries, reflections or notes, for reference when creating stories or characters in the future, rather than for being carefully reviewed by others, because sometimes I write something negative without realizing it."
At the end of the article, she mentioned the word "darkness" again, emphasizing that she has fallen to her current fate. "There is something very dark behind this. But I want to tell you, the more you want me to sink, the stronger I will be. If my words hurt you, please forgive me again. Sincerely Kara. Namo Amitabha."
Yes, that’s right. Gascón has been a devout follower of the Japanese Buddhist sect Nichiren for the past decade, so Buddhism seems to be the only thing that never gets criticized in her collection of social media rants about everything and everyone.
