Sasha Stone's bitterness distorts many of her views. But at least her view of Emilia Perez I can mostly agree with.
Sasha Stone on the death of the Oscars and Hollywood:https://t.co/R1DFljMeSW
— Tablet Magazine (@tabletmag) February 27, 2025
Emilia Pérez was a French movie about a Mexican drug lord who transitions to become female. And did I mention it was a musical? It was the living embodiment of what we call “wokeness.” It had it all, even a love scene with the transgender actress who would make history with nomination after nomination, up to and including the Oscars.
We all knew to prepare for the first transgender actress to make history. We have all been trained to go along with the ritual of cradling a nominee like a precious egg all for the sake of preserving the necessary messaging by the industry that they are all good people doing good things. It was an inevitability that the Cannes jury, led by Greta Gerwig, gave its Best Actress prize to all of the actresses in Emilia Pérez, including its star, Karla Sofia Gascon.
Netflix snapped up the film, sensing it would be a major Oscar player. A Best Picture win for Netflix was so close they could almost taste it. Their whiz kid Oscar strategist, Lisa Taback, had left the Weinstein Co. before the scandal hit: She’d been helping them land a Best Picture contender every year, bringing in wins like The King’s Speech and The Artist. Netflix hired her to work the same magic for them, and she did. She was bringing in one, sometimes two Best Picture contenders every year, but so far, a win had been just out of reach.
When Emilia Pérez won Best Picture in musical/comedy at the Golden Globes, beating Anora was all the hype Netflix needed to take their campaign to the finish line. When the Oscar nominations were finally announced, Emilia Pérez led with 13, joining such historic Oscar juggernauts as From Here to Eternity, Gone with the Wind, Forrest Gump, and Oppenheimer.
As the front-runner, Emilia Pérez had the expected target on its back. Netflix was deflecting slings and arrows from every direction. Mexicans hated that it was a French movie that got Mexico wrong. The transgender community didn’t like its depiction of a trans person. Film fans thought it was terrible, one of the worst films ever made. How could it have gotten 13 nominations?
And then there were people like me who braved even more treacherous waters by calling out the system that pushed out veterans who had worked their entire careers to win a spot in the Best Actress lineup. It was an unfair advantage, yet again, because the only reason Karla Sofia Gascon was nominated was because she was transgender; the idea that her performance reached any high level of art equivalent to that of the world’s best actresses was plainly a joke.
What finally destroyed the Best Picture chances for Emilia Pérez was the titular star herself, Karla Sofia Gascon, whose thinking ran a little hot, shall we say. Some journalist found a trove of her old racist, bigoted tweets just sitting there in plain view on X, albeit in Spanish. It’s not that no one in studio offices speaks Spanish—although that might help. No one had bothered to do a pre-Oscars background check on Gascon, since she was by definition the incarnation of Hollywood’s collective virtue. After all, she was a darker-skinned transgender person—and thereby the embodiment of the left’s identity-politics ideology. Emilia Pérez, the trades announced it, was to be an ultimate “fuck you” to Donald Trump. Who would dare vote against that?
The consequences for Gascon’s ancient thought-crimes were swift and immediate. Netflix refused to pay for her travel expenses. They told her to disappear. Instead, the actress went rogue and appeared on Spanish CNN, crying through the interview and comparing herself to Rosa Parks. It was a wildfire, all right, and it was burning through Netflix’s best chance to win Best Picture.
