Netflix’s Emilia Perez was a presumed favorite to take home awards for some of the biggest Oscars categories this year until Karla Sofía Gascón’s social media scandal, and now the streamer has finally admitted that the situation is “really a bummer.”
Chief content officer Bela Bajaria made the comments on the latest episode of Matt Belioni’s The Town podcast, released Friday.
“If you look at the nominations, and all of this awards love that it’s received, I think it’s such a bummer that [the scandal] distracted from that,” Bajaria said, especially “for the 100 incredibly talented people who made an amazing movie.”
As for whether Netflix may consider vetting its stars’ social media accounts before awards season going forward, Bajaria said, “It’s not really common practice for people to vet social tweets that way… A lot of people are reevaluating that… I do think it is raising questions for a lot of people about reevaluating that process.”
When Gascón, a trans actress who plays the film’s title character, was discovered to have been making racist, Islamophobic, and xenophobic tweets for years, her chances of winning the Oscar nomination for Best Actress essentially went up in smoke and blew the race wide open.
Gascón then worsened her situation by giving an interview to CNN in Spanish in which she took minimal responsibility and pointed fingers at others.
Since then, her co-star Zoe Saldaña condemned “negative rhetoric of racism and bigotry towards any group of people,” without mentioning Gascón by name. The film’s director Jacques Audiard slammed the star for “hurting the crew and all these people who worked so incredibly hard on this film.”
Selena Gomez, Gascón’s other co-star (whom Gascón ridiculed by name in the unearthed posts), has yet to comment directly, however she did seem to make subtle mention of the situation earlier this week, admitting that “the magic [around the film] has disappeared.”
Netflix has seemingly tried to contain the situation by removing Gascón from promotional materials and essentially disinviting her from awards events, as it tries to salvage the film’s 12 other Oscar nominations, including Saldaña’s for Best Supporting Actress.
Bajaria admitted that Gascón’s posts have “taken the conversation in a different way,” but described the scandal as unavoidable.
“Are we going to actually look at the personal social media of tens of thousands of people, every single day around the world, [given the] amount of original film and TV and co-prods that we make and license?” she pondered aloud in the episode. “It raises a lot of questions about what that should look like.”
