Inside Netflix's £25m trans Oscars train-wreck

Telegraph

03-03-2025

When Hollywood's actors and writers downed tools around two years ago during the strikes which paralysed the industry, even the most clear-sighted studio executive could never have guessed that it would lead to all this.
The strikes left the cupboards bare at Netflix. And early last year, the streaming giant realised they had nothing lined up for the coming Oscar season. For the last six years, they'd always managed to cook up a heavyweight Best Picture prospect in-house: Maestro, Marriage Story, Mank, The Irishman, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Power of the Dog and Roma had all snagged between six and 10 nominations apiece. (The latter three had even snagged Best Film at Bafta, though the equivalent prize at the Academy had always remained just out of reach.)
So in May, the studio's newly installed chairman of its film division, Dan Lin, sat down with his executives and told them to think smart. Look at the boutique distributor Neon, he counselled: a minnow to Netflix's beluga whale, yet their savvy acquisitions team had secured a number of Best Picture contenders from the festival circuit. Anatomy of a Fall was theirs, as was Triangle of Sadness – and Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, which in 2020 won the race outright.
Later that month, Lin's team jetted off to Cannes with one mission in mind: to find and buy this year's Parasite. That meant a stylish, provocative, perhaps foreign-language feature that was liable to win big in the competition strand, had been made by a brand-name auteur, with some sort of social message that would strike a chord with progressive Hollywood types.
By the third day of the festival, Lin was convinced he had found it. Unveiled at the Grand Théâtre Lumière that evening was a musical underworld thriller from former Palme d'Or winner Jacques Audiard about a Mexican gangster who finds salvation – for a while, anyway – through gender transition. It starred Gen-Z favourite Selena Gomez (the most-followed woman on Instagram), Avatar and Marvel veteran Zoe Saldaña – and Karla Sofía Gascón, a 52-year-old Spanish-born star of Mexican soaps who, like the film's title character, was actually trans: no appropriation here. Better still, word on the Croisette was that the festival's all-star jury was besotted – or at least a vocal cohort was, led by that year's Best Actress Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone.
For Lin's first year in post, he couldn't have hoped for a better Oscar prospect than Emilia Pérez. Less than 48 hours before the festival's closing ceremony, at which Audiard's film would win the Best Actress prize (split between its leads) and the Prix du Jury, out came the chequebook. The European distributor Pathé had already agreed to release the film in France before the festival, but Netflix spent $8 million on the US, UK and Canadian rights. At last, Netflix had its 2025 Oscar contender. What could possibly go wrong?
According to veteran campaign strategists and distributors who spoke to the Telegraph on condition of anonymity, the answer was: almost everything. Emilia Pérez was described by one as an 'all eggs in one basket' project. Netflix's 60-man awards operation – led by the fearsome Lisa Taback, who learnt her craft at Harvey Weinstein's Miramax and The Weinstein Company in their nineties-to-noughties heyday – focused on it even to the exclusion of Angelina Jolie's stately Maria Callas biopic Maria, a more conventional awards-season offering the streamer acquired out of Venice last year. Campaign spending on Emilia Pérez 'was approaching £25 million,' another disclosed: more than the film's entire production budget, and the sort of sum more usually set aside for major Hollywood works than quirky festival pickups.
Yet for all their scheming and spending, Netflix have just two Academy Awards to show for their trouble: Best Supporting Actress for Saldaña and Best Original Song for El Mal, a ditty so thumpingly unmemorable that Oscar producers didn't even think to put on a live performance at the ceremony. What's more, despite its slews of nominations – 13 from the Academy (a non-English-language record, handily trouncing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's 10), and 11 at the Baftas last month, of which it also won two – the film leaves the season with its reputation in tatters.
On Netflix itself, it has struggled to find an audience: by the end of last year it had amassed just 1.5 million views, leaving it outside the service's top 1,500 most-watched features. (Figures for the start of this year will be released in June.) And considering its user scores on both the cinephile haven Letterboxd and the rowdier Rotten Tomatoes are the lowest of any Best Picture nominee in history, those who caught it don't appear to have been especially wowed.
Meanwhile in the press and on social media, it has been panned from every angle imaginable, as LGBT groups, gender-critical feminists, numerous high-profile members of the Mexican film industry, Right-wing current affairs pundits and European populist leaders have all lined up to take a pop. So how did the film Netflix once saw as a safe bet become the nexus of such chaos?
The answer can be traced back to last May, and that fateful flap of the chequebook. 'Whatever you think of Emilia Pérez,' shares a strategist of 10 years' experience, 'it was simply never built to withstand the demands of a Best Picture race. Best International, the critics' circuit, sure. But under that sort of spotlight, the holes are just too obvious, let alone all the other stuff that was waiting to come out.'
Hole number one: in an industry that currently craves moral clarity, Emilia Pérez is an ideological mess. A transgender-led narrative must have sounded progressive to Netflix's buyers, but the title character is a murderous cartel boss who uses gender reassignment partly for self-glorification, and partly as a means of dodging justice. Hence the pushback from the LGBT lobby after the film opened on the Netflix platform last November: the influential US organisation GLAAD, launched in 1985 to monitor media coverage of LGBT issues, described its portrayal of a transgender character as 'inauthentic' and 'profoundly retrograde'.
Hole number two concerned the film's multicultural credentials. These felt comfortingly anti-Trump at first blush, but were somewhat undercut by the fact that the film was shot entirely in a studio on the outskirts of Paris by a French director who cheerfully confessed his research into contemporary Mexico was limited, and included only one Mexican performer among his named cast. Moreover, the film depicted Mexico itself as a borderline-cartoonish hellhole, prompting the country's acclaimed cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto – himself a four-time Oscar nominee for his work with Martin Scorsese and Ang Lee – to describe it as 'completely inauthentic' and 'troubling'.
As with the sticking points around trans representation, however, this issue wasn't picked up by the first wave of coverage out of Cannes. Whatever furious YouTubers might suggest, the international film press isn't overflowing with transgender Mexicans, though Netflix failed to spot that these perspectives were missing from the first wave of (broadly positive) reviews.
Then there was hole number three, which turned out to be the size of the Chicxulub crater, yet took a while to fully reveal itself. In Gomez and Saldaña, Emilia Pérez had two scrupulously media-trained stars. But the same couldn't be said of their cast-mate Gascón, whose loud-mouthed activity on X, formerly Twitter, became the first major stick in the campaign's spokes.
There was a brief grace period, at least, after January's Oscar nominations announcement, at which Gascón became the first transgender performer ever to be shortlisted for Best Actress. The history-making angle was heavily stressed in the first phase of Netflix's campaign, with tame pundits in Variety, the New York Times and elsewhere dutifully parroting the line from as early as last August.
It evidently clicked with the Academy, who chose to nominate Gascón's work over acclaimed turns from Nicole Kidman, Amy Adams, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Saoirse Ronan and Angelina Jolie, Netflix's starrier but less buzzy prospect in Maria. And up and down the ballot, almost every discipline from screenwriting to cinematography, editing to sound, wanted to associate itself with this impending epoch-making first.
'You would be amazed by how many of those craft and technical nominations can be secured by just coming up with a compelling message and then spend, spend, spend,' a strategist says. 'Voters see a big, newsy event coming and want to be a part of it.'
Or at least, they did for a bit. A week after nominations day, years of Gascón's moronic social media posts – some as excruciatingly recent as 2021 – were unearthed by journalist Sarah Hagi, in which the actress had made racist quips about China, described the American police shooting victim George Floyd as a 'drug addict', repeatedly disparaged Islam, and (irony of ironies) mocked diversity at the Oscars, the 2021 edition of which she likened variously to 'an Afro-Korean festival', 'a Black Lives Matter demonstration' and a women's rights march.
A further post contained the unfortunate phrase 'I do not understand such world war against Hitler, he simply had his opinion about the Jews,' which was later described by Gascón as having been widely misinterpreted. Meanwhile, she appeared to call her future co-star Gomez a 'rich rat' in 2022, though this was said to have been Photoshopped.
The warning signs were arguably visible in a post-Cannes tweet in which Gascón described her detractors as 'GARGOYLES OF BEELZEBUB' – sic, including the all-caps. (This was a few days after the French populist MEP Marion Maréchal tweeted during the festival's awards ceremony: 'So a man has won best actress.') But even this didn't prompt Netflix to take a precautionary comb through her account, and Taback and her team were, by all accounts, blindsided by what was unearthed.
Within Hollywood itself, rising stars' online presences are usually steam-cleaned by specialist PR firms before they come under public scrutiny – a task that costs between £5,000 and £15,000, according to estimates. Gascón was neither a fresh face nor a Hollywood discovery, but why didn't Netflix carry out checks, just in case?
it's so insane that karla sofía gascón still has these tweets up. straight up have never seen tweets this racist from someone actively campaigning to win an ACADEMY AWARD. there are more than a dozen… pic.twitter.com/1rcNzkJXuo
— sarah hagi (@KindaHagi) January 30, 2025
'Of course from the 2025 festival season on, everyone's going to be combing actors' social accounts like they're checking their kids' hair for lice,' one strategist explains. 'But though it sounds ridiculously naive, Taback's team will have assumed that because Gascón is herself transgender, her views on every topic under the sun would be woker than woke. And of course that didn't turn out to be the case.'
In Europe, where cancellation is less of a cultural force, the reaction to Gascón's posts was more measured. The nomination was still cause to celebrate, commentators from her home country of Spain suggested, even if her expressed views were somewhat regrettable. And a recent Italian newspaper profile didn't even find space to mention those bombshell tweets until its final six sentences.
Yet back in the US, so taken aback was Taback by this turn of events that she almost immediately lost control of the subsequent apology tour – a regular feature of the campaign circuit. For an example of how these things should be done, look to Gascón's Best Actress rival Fernanda Torres, who appeared in blackface on a Brazilian sketch show in 2008. Mere hours after the clip surfaced in January, a meticulous statement ran on the industry website Deadline, in which Torres apologised, contextualised and offered hope for the future in 160 words.
Gascón's far briefer initial statement, by contrast, had a tin-eared, self-pitying tone – 'as someone in a marginalised community, I know this suffering all too well,' part of it went – and was released in tandem with the shuttering of her X account. A second statement, nearly ten times as long as the first, followed barely 24 hours later, in which she described being targeted with death threats and harassment, spoke of a lengthy track record of having 'defended each and every one of the minorities in this world,' referred to herself in the third person, and blamed the emergence of the story on 'something very dark'. (In a video interview before the tweet scandal broke, Gascón accused the I'm Still Here PR team of 'tearing [her] down', though later walked back the accusation in yet another press statement.)
This diatribe, every strategist the Telegraph spoke to agreed, did not pass under the noses of Netflix HQ. 'It's self-serving gibberish,' one said.
All of three days later, Gascón popped up on the Spanish news channel CNN en Español, and gave a tearful hour-long interview in which she again cast herself as a victim, stressed that she didn't 'give a damn about awards', and darkly alluded to a dirty tricks campaign. If the second statement was an unmanaged misstep in Netflix's eyes, this one was an outright disaster.
'When the story broke we could hear the explosion from across town,' one publicist chuckled. For the streamer, this was the final straw. Gascón's name and image was removed from all Emilia Pérez campaign materials, while her formerly lavish travel, wardrobe and make-up budget was summarily cut off.
Meanwhile, Audiard was wheeled back out by Taback, like a loved one being handed a megaphone at a hostage negotiation. 'Why is she harming herself? Why?' he wondered, in a tense interview with Deadline. 'I'm thinking... of how [she's] hurting others, of how she's hurting the crew and all these people who worked so incredibly hard on this film. I'm thinking of myself, I'm thinking of Zoe and Selena. I just don't understand why she's continuing to harm us.'
That did the trick. In an Instagram post a few days later, Gascón promised a period of 'silence' in which she would 'let the work talk for itself' – and until last night's ceremony was largely invisible. She was a no-show at Spain's Goya Awards, where Emilia Pérez won Best Film, and at last week's Oscar nominees' dinner, at which the Academy's iconic annual 'class photo' is snapped.
Gascón did end up attending the Oscars themselves, albeit in a muted high-street-style dress, some distance from the glamorous looks she sported at Cannes and the Golden Globes, and she tactically skipped the red carpet. Her most notable appearance in the ceremony was in a Conan O'Brien gag, when the host joshed: 'Anora uses the f-word 479 times. That's more than the record set by Karla Sofía Gascón's publicist. Karla, if you are going to tweet about the Oscars tonight, my name is Jimmy Kimmel.'
For Netflix's rivals on the Oscar circuit, the saga has been 'a source of no little schadenfreude,' one publicist grins. 'But for all of us, it's also been such a cautionary tale – real there-but-for-the-grace-of-God stuff. We all watch what the studios and distributors bring back from Venice and Cannes; we all want to be part of the team that's handed a hidden gem that goes on to blow everyone away. With another movie – I mean, awful as it is to say, even with the same movie but with another lead – Netflix could have made all of the same moves and swept the board.'
But there is only one victim here, all agree: poor old Emilia Pérez itself. (The movie, that is, not the former drug lord.) 'In trying to make Audiard's work something it was never meant to be, it's become something else entirely – this sort of ridiculous monster,' one distributor rues. 'It may be a long, long time before anyone thinks of it as just a film.'