The Oscars CEO Broke His Silence On "Emilia Pérez" Star Karla Sofía Gascón Reportedly Attending The Show
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By now, you're all too familiar with the massive flameout that was Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón's Best Actress Oscars campaign.
If you're not: Back in January, journalist Sarah Hagi uncovered a lot of offensive tweets that Karla sent between 2016 and 2023. The breadth of the bigotry on display was, quite frankly, staggering. There were anti-Islam tweets, offensive tweets about Chinese people, tweets complaining about Black Lives Matter and the 2020 Oscars. You name it, she tweeted about it.
The fallout was swift. Costar Zoe Saldaña distanced herself from Karla's tweets twice, while Selena Gomez admitted that "Some of the magic has disappeared" around promoting the film. The film's director Jacques Audiard basically condemned her, and then he changed his mind the second someone handed him another award for the film. So it goes!
Karla, meanwhile, attempted to apologize, several times, without much success. She even gave an extremely defensive hour-long interview to CNN Español, before ultimately saying she'd keep quiet after coming across as defensive in every prior statement.
As we've inched towards tomorrow night's Oscars ceremony, Karla has slowly come back into the awards season fold. She walked the red carpet at the Cesar Film Awards last night, and earlier this week reports emerged that, after initially puling funding for her Oscar campaigning, Netflix is paying for Karla to attend the shindig tomorrow.
In the midst of this, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences CEO Bill Kramer gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter in which he addressed the potential controversy of Karla attending the Oscars tomorrow night.
"The Academy does not condone hate speech — I want to be very clear about that," he said, while also mentioning that Karla's nomination (she's the first out trans person to be nominated for an acting Oscar) is "historic." "That's really important," he added. "She's still a nominee. We honor that, but we do not condone hate speech."
Bill also noted that "all nominees are invited to attend the show," and that certainly includes Karla. "If Karla joins us for the night, I hope there is an air of respect," he said. "We have over 200 nominees. The night is about much more than one person. We are there to celebrate all of our nominees."
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