"Emilia Perez"  made headlines for leading the Oscar run, with  13 nominations,  including best actress for Karla Sofia Gascon, who is the first openly transgender person to be nominated in the category.

But the star of the Spanish-language musical crime drama directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard has now been taken out of Netflix's Oscars advertising campaign after racist and Islamophobic posts she made on Twitter (now X) were unearthed.

Canadian journalist Sarah Hagi researched the star's social media past and publicized the offensive tweets she had made in recent years about Islam, George Floyd and diversity at the Oscars

Since the revelations came out, Gascon closed her X account, sent a defiant op-ed to the Hollywood Reporter, broke down in tears in an interview on CNN en Espanol and published multiple Instagram posts on the topic.

Most of these moves were not guided by Netflix, which has largely distanced itself from its star.

Speaking to Variety, journalist Sarah Hagi explained why she wanted the tweets to gain traction: "When someone in a historic position representing a film built on so-called progressive values has a history of racist and bigoted tweets, it exposes the hypocrisy of it all. This isn't about meaningful representation — it's just marketing. And that marketing falls apart when the person at the center of it is a racist bigot."

Bad timing for Netflix

Netflix had launched a major advertising campaign in the hopes of taking home the global streaming network's first best picture award.

But the Gascon scandal emerged just as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences entered the final balloting period, held from February 11-18.

A broad group of people is participating in this vote. 

For nominations, Academy members — ranging from actors and writers to directors and costume designers — are only allowed to vote in award categories related to their own branch of work and for best picture; but for the final vote, the nearly 10,000 members of the professional honorary organization are allowed to cast ballots in any category.

The 73rd Academy Awards ceremony takes place on March 2.

The business of Oscar campaigns

The campaigns that help movies cinch Oscar wins are meticulously calculated and generously financed.

According to a 2017 New Yorker story, a film can spend up to $15 million (€14 million) on a single campaign. With an annual revenue in 2024 of $39 billion, Netflix, no doubt, has funneled plenty of marketing funds into the movie.

An Oscars campaign typically includes an entire team of professional strategists who advise on all matters related to publicity, including which film festivals should be selected and which star should appear where. 

Harvey Weinstein's legacy of publicity stunts

Many attribute the modern playbook of Oscars campaigning to Harvey Weinstein, who headed major Hollywood production and distribution company Miramax  — and who has since come to notoriety as a convicted sex offender at the center of the #MeToo movement.

In the 1990s, Weinstein started applying his strategy of aggressive campaigning, using over-the-top publicity stunts and breaking the rules of good sportsmanship.

Over the next years, he was involved in a number of wins and was known for stopping at nothing to get Miramax films awarded — a bullishness that is especially dark in view of his history of sexual abuse.

Hollywood insiders believe that such tactics likely led to the 1999 Oscar win of Weinstein's Miramax film "Shakespeare in Love" over Steven Spielberg's poignant war drama "Saving Private Ryan," in part after Weinstein badmouthed the latter to journalists while using other questionable tactics.

This marked the start of a period when it was not uncommon to find a negative article about a film during awards season that may have been planted by the competition.

When "Gangs of New York," another Miramax film, was nominated for best picture in 2003, an opinion piece was published endorsing the film by former Academy president, "The Sound of Music" director Robert Wise. Weinstein then published "for your consideration" ads with quotes from the op-ed.

However, it turned out that the opinion piece had not even been not penned by Wise himself, but rather ghostwritten by a Miramax publicist. The film went home empty-handed and the Academy then tightened its rules to ban advertising that includes quotes or comments by Academy members.

Unusual moves

In recent years, the eyebrow-raising tactics have continued. In 2011, actress Melissa Leo paid for her own ad campaign, hoping to win best supporting actress for her role in "The Fighter." It featured photos of herself wearing furs along with the text "Consider…"

Although some in the industry poked fun of the actress's brazen tactics, Leo said she was just doing the kind of campaigning that is always done, yet out in the open. "This entire awards process to some degree is about pimping yourself out. I'm confident my fans will understand the ads were about showing a different side of myself," she told the New York Times. It paid off: She took home the Oscar.

One of the most recent scandals involved actress Andrea Riseborough, who got a best-actress nomination for her role in the little-touted 2022 indie film "To Leslie" after a number of big-name stars such as Charlize Theron and Gwyneth Paltrow spoke positively about Riseborough's performance.

It turned out that the well-connected director, Michael Morris, and his wife Mary McCormack, had prompted the A-listers and other influential media voices, including Howard Stern and Marc Maron, to host screenings and plug the film on their social media channels. The incident prompted a review of Academy procedures.

What's happening with 'Emilia Perez'?

Karla Sofia Gascon, no longer part of of the post-nomination phase of the Oscars campaign of "Emilia Perez," is not expected to attend upcoming scheduled visits to the Critics Choice Awards and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, among others.

But beyond Gascon's tweets, controversy has followed the film almost from the start. Despite the rave reviews at Cannes where it debuted, the movie has sparked criticism in Mexico for making use of stereotypes, trivializing the drug war that has resulted in thousands of casualties and disappearances, and for its inauthentic portrayal of trans identity.

The movie still won best European film at Spain's version of the Oscars, the Goya Awards, on February 9. However, voting on the films for the Goyas closed January 24 — before the offensive tweets were made public. 

Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier