February 5, 2025 - 4:00pm

Karla Sofía Gascón has made history by becoming the first trans woman to be nominated for an Oscar, for her performance in the musical Emilia Pérez. Though criticised for dabbling in clichés and stereotypes about trans people and Mexicans, the film and her performance seemed to please an Academy which is always keen to flaunt its progressive credentials. DEI considerations, naturally, have become an important part of deciding who gets an award and why.

But, as it turns out, Gascón is not the model of aspirational representation and progressive politics the Academy thought she was. After a series of unearthed social media posts showed her expressing unsavoury opinions, the star in consideration for an Oscar because of wokeness has now been cancelled because of wokeness. One tweet referred to Islam as a “hotbed of infection for humanity”, while others took swipes at George Floyd and Chinese people. In response, Netflix has dropped her from promotional material while the producers of the film have distanced themselves from the star.

Some of Gascón’s remarks are clearly unpleasant, and touch on uncomfortable subjects that many — especially in liberal Hollywood — would rather ignore. It is understandable that Netflix and the Emilia Pérez team would rather not deal with the hassle of being bombarded with awkward questions about Gascón’s views at every press event. Yet, it is an overreaction to completely exclude the lead actor from campaigns and the award circuit just to save face. All that was required was a public apology to address the controversy and draw a line under it.

Judging on the film alone, however, Emilia Pérez, and Gascón’s performance in particular, are hardly deserving of such high praise. The fact that Gascón’s Oscar chances only tanked because of her social media peccadilloes shows the film was never going to be judged on artistic merit, but instead on supposed political and social virtues. A lot of its support was centred more around how the film stuck the middle finger up to Donald Trump, rather than its cinematic strengths. As Scott Feinberg at the Hollywood Reporter has analogised, the Oscars is more akin to a political campaign than a considered competition between the best films of the year. As with politics, scandals will always be treated as public relations disasters to manage and popularity is not always deserved.

It is assumed that, being trans, Gascón ought to know better than to have criticised other “marginalised communities”. She has repeated this line, saying that “as someone in a marginalised community, I know this suffering all too well” and that is why she is sorry. But being trans is a matter of personal identity; it doesn’t denote a political worldview. Wanting the right to live as your “authentic self” doesn’t automatically equate to being a defender of all marginalised peoples.

It is absurd to assume that there is a trans “community” that is uniform in socio-political views, and that its members must have sympathy for conservative religious Muslims because they can both be subject to prejudice and abuse. The coalition of “protected characteristics” is an extremely arbitrary and loose one. But this is the mess you get with an industry which sincerely believes its stars are moral leaders who must set the tone for the rest of us.

If anyone thought otherwise, cancel culture is clearly still alive and well. Cancellations no longer know any bounds, and being trans is not a disqualifying factor anymore. This censoriousness might be even more frenzied under a second Trump administration, since it’s the only way for a wounded progressive liberalism to assert its taboos against transgressors.

Had Gascón or the film been judged on merit, this would all seem trivial, or at least less relevant to the considerations at hand. But Emilia Pérez is a political artefact, not an aesthetic one. We shouldn’t be surprised that it is being treated as such.


Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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