Well, it’ll arrive as a shock to no one that Karla Sofía Gascón will not attend the BAFTA Film Awards this weekend. Per reports, the star of the multi-nominated film Emilia Pérez—and the first openly trans woman to be nominated in the Oscars’ Best Actress category—was left off the ceremony’s guest list in light of her recent controversy.
Gascón, if you haven’t heard, has had quite the month. In January, the actor’s racist, Islamophobic, and all-around hateful politics were revealed in resurfaced tweets. Among them was a tweet from 2020 (it’s now deleted) that included a photo of a Muslim family (with a woman in a burka) dining in a restaurant.“Islam is marvelous, without any machismo. Women are respected, and when they are so respected they are left with a little squared hole on their faces for their eyes to be visible and their mouths, but only if she behaves,” she wrote. “Although they dress this way for their own enjoyment. How DEEPLY DISGUSTING OF HUMANITY.”
Also in 2020, posted days after George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, Gascón tweeted: “I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys Without rights and consider policemen to be assassins. They’re all wrong.” And in another tweet from 2019, she wrote that Hitler “simply had his opinions of the Jews.” She even punctuated it with a prayer hands emojis.
Unfortunately, these very public backings of bigotry continued in 2021, when she likened the Oscars to an “Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M. Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.”
The tweets drew swift backlash and an onslaught of ham-handed apologies from Gascón. In an interview with CNN en Español on February 2, for example, she said: “I feel and very much identify with the people who were thrown off buses for the color of their skin, with the people who did not want them to study at university, for the people who were hated simply for existing, like how I am hated in this moment.”
Gascon, The Hollywood Reporter reported last week, skipped a series of pre-Oscar events that are considered unmissable campaign events for nominees. They included the AFI Awards luncheon, the Critics Choice Awards, the Directors Guild Award, the Producers Guild Awards, and the Virtuoso Awards. She has since been removed from Netflix’s email blasts and ad-reads promoting the film, and her co-stars and director have all but denounced her.
Now, while the Academy has yet to withdraw her nomination, the BAFTAs are typically seen as a harbinger of how the Oscars will go. Winners and losers at the BAFTAs are typically the winners and losers at the Oscars. That said, one has to wonder if the Academy will keep her nomination, but hope she doesn’t come given the controversy…or quietly uninvite her. What’s more clear, however, is the fact that there’s no way in hell Gascón is getting the award anyway.
