Oscars 2025: How the ‘Emilia Perez’ controversy has created the messiest awards race in years

The latest scandal to rock the Academy Awards, centered around ‘Emilia Pérez’, has evolved into a full-blown disaster, reshuffling the deck on what was already one of the most unpredictable Oscar races in years

There are bad Oscar campaigns, and then there are campaigns so catastrophically self-inflicted that they make you wonder if someone, somewhere, lost a bet. The case of Emilia Pérez, once the clear frontrunner with a staggering 13 nominations, is increasingly starting to look like the latter. The musical crime drama from French director Jacques Audiard entered the race with all the momentum in the world: glowing reviews, a Palme d’Or win at Cannes, and a record-breaking 13 Oscar nominations, including a historic nod for Karla Sofía Gascón, the first openly transgender actor to be recognized by the Academy. But then, as is tradition in the awards cycle, the Internet did what it does best — it found the receipts.

At the eye of the storm is Karla Sofía Gascón, Emilia Pérez’s once-celebrated star, whose nomination made her the first openly transgender performer recognized by the Academy. For a brief, shining moment, she was the progressive fairy tale of the season. Soon, someone started digging through her old Tweets, only to happen across an all-you-can-eat buffet of bigotry. Between 2020 and 2021, Gascón apparently had thoughts on everything from George Floyd to Islam, none of them good. She ranted about “too many Muslims” in Spain, implied that Islam should be banned, and mocked the Oscars themselves for being an “Afro-Korean festival.” Naturally, the Academy was not thrilled.

For a film that had positioned itself as a beacon of progressive storytelling, the optics were catastrophic. The Academy, which has spent the better part of the last decade frantically attempting to modernise itself for a more liberal audience, suddenly found one of its anointed contenders tainted by a fresh hell.

The backlash was swift, and Netflix, the studio behind Emilia Pérez, found itself in a PR nightmare. Zoe Saldaña, Gascón’s co-star and a frontrunner for Best Supporting Actress, scrambled to distance herself from the scandal without outright throwing Gascón under the bus. As the Frenchman making a movie about Mexican cartel violence shot almost entirely in Paris, Audiard found himself answering uncomfortable questions about whether Emilia Pérez had any business being the kind of “progressive” Oscar darling it was pretending to be.

And so, just like that, the film that was supposed to be a frontrunner has now become something else entirely: a test case for whether Hollywood’s institutional memory has grown longer than a single news cycle. The damage is so severe that its once-unstoppable momentum has stalled, and whispers are growing that Academy members may hesitate to vote for it in any category, lest they be accused of excusing racism, xenophobia, or just bad optics. Saldaña’s once-assured win is now in jeopardy, and even Best Picture — which Emilia Pérez seemed poised to claim — may be (thankfully) slipping away.

Can Emilia Pérez still win Best Picture if its lead actor is radioactive? Can Gascón still claim victory, or is she destined to become this year’s cautionary tale? At the very least, one thing has become clear: there is no longer a frontrunner in this race, just a handful of contenders and a whole lot of chaos.

And that’s just the beginning. Emilia Pérez may have detonated the loudest scandal of the season, but it is far from the only film taking collateral damage. Take The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s prestige drama that had all the hallmarks of Best Picture, until Corbet admitted that AI was used to create some of its imagery and tweak Hungarian pronunciation. Considering that Hollywood spent all of 2023 battling AI over labour rights, the revelation quickly transformed what should have been an arthouse darling into a potential pariah.