Oscar season is in full swing – which also means that Oscar smear campaign season is in full swing. And it’s swinging in a way it hasn’t in a minute!
Let’s run through a few of these, shall we? The first little hint of a smear happened last year, when Mikey Madison discussed the decision not to use an intimacy coordinator in the film “Anora” during a Variety Actors on Actors conversation with Pamela Anderson (the internet went into a bit of a tizzy over that one). “The Brutalist” came under fire recently for its use of artificial intelligence, specifically for the use of the tool Respeecher (also used in front runner “Emilia Pérez”) to augment aspects of actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ Hungarian accents, as well as the use of AI to generate some designs toward the end of the film. In late January, Best Actress contender Fernanda Torres recently apologized for appearing in Black face in a comedy sketch 17 years ago.
But the story that has eclipsed all of these has to do with (what else?) old, bad tweets. Years of bigoted tweets recently came to light from Karla Sofía Gascón, nominated for Best Actress for her role in “Emilia Pérez” and the first openly trans actor to be nominated. The tweets mention everything from George Floyd to Islam, and Gascón has not made things better for herself in the meantime, giving defensive interviews on CNN and claiming sabotage. In light of these recent events, Netflix is reportedly distancing itself from the star, and she is no longer attending many campaign events in Los Angeles.
Let’s unpack a bit: what does Gascón mean when she says sabotage? What do I mean when I say Oscar smear campaign? After all, the editor of “The Brutalist” admitted to using AI openly in an interview. Madison talked openly about the lack of an intimacy coordinator on the set of “Anora” in a very popular interview series. No one held a gun to Gascón’s head and forced her to tweet those heinous things. And finally, not all of these offenses feel of the same magnitude. How can say this is the work of some higher power trying to tarnish the awards chances of others?
Well, we really can’t for sure. But it would be naive of us to believe that studios don’t plant and/or take advantage of stories like these about their awards competitors. It’s all about narrative and what people are talking about.
“Anora,” a movie about sex work, suddenly has a conversation around it about the importance of intimacy coordinators. “The Brutalist,” a movie dealing in uncompromising artistic integrity, suddenly has a conversation around it about the use of AI. “Emilia Pérez,” a movie about a trans person starring a trans person – and for some voters, I think, emblematic of progress, particularly in the wake of President Donald Trump’s second election – suddenly has a conversation around it about bigotry and hate. Timing is important too; Gascón didn’t seem to be trying to hide her tweets, but they weren’t talked about until after she was nominated for an Oscar, and the movie for another 12.
And yet, in the social media era of smear campaigns, it’s a little more difficult to pin down what’s organic and what’s not. Journalist Sarah Hagi, the person who unearthed Gascón’s tweets, recently gave an interview to Variety where she denied there was any conspiracy or studio dealings behind her discovery. I tend to believe her when she says she was merely curious – I completely understand the urge to dig into a random celebrity’s business online. But I think this raises interesting questions about how these types of things unfold in the new, social media era.
In the old days, things worked differently. William Randolph Hearst would discredit Orson Welles in his papers and get major theater chains to refuse to show “Citizen Kane;” an article would come out saying that John Nash, the subject of the film “A Beautiful Mind,” was an antisemite, and the filmmakers tried to cover that up; Harvey Weinstein would badmouth “Saving Private Ryan” to enough journalists until the idea that it wasn’t that great stuck; even as recently as 2012, establishment media played a much larger role in these things – for example, a New Yorker article saying “Zero Dark Thirty” endorsed the torture of prisoners came out less than a week before Oscar voting started.
What’s happening to “Emilia Pérez” isn’t a completely new thing (When 2018’s “Green Book” was in the Oscar race, producer/cowriter Nick Vallelonga came under fire for anti-muslim tweets), and it’s something we see constantly on the internet. Social media narratives now feel more organic than ever, sometimes because they do start that way. I don’t think Hagi is an industry plant, but do I think that maybe other campaigns have taken advantage of her discovery? Absolutely. Do I think bots on X and stan armies from Brazil are in on the job in equal measure? I do. We’ve seen in the past few years in the case of Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, and more recently with Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively, how PR experts can use social media to their advantage. What is fascinating to me about all of this is how PR teams seem to know how to go on the attack, but lack the ability to be preemptively defensive.
Gascón has not done herself any favors in the days since Hagi’s initial tweet went viral, digging herself deeper into a hole I’m not sure she’ll be able to get out of. Some might dismiss this as cancel culture, that Hagi went looking for something amiss with Gascón’s past. But I think that’s a little bit of a lazy way to look at things. In addition to being horrid, these tweets were not hidden and not hard to find. Gascón has essentially been campaigning for awards since “Emilia Pérez” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival back in May of 2024 – a campaign run by one of the most powerful entertainment companies in the world, Netflix.
If you’re a PR person dealing with a new star who isn’t used to this amount of global scrutiny, why wouldn’t your first move be to scrub their social media accounts? As a layman, I’m glad I’m aware that this side of Gascón exists. But if I were a PR person, scrubbing would seem like the most logical first step to me. There’s so much focus on the PR strategy for seeding stories, but preventing them still seems to be elusive.
