The idea that Netflix never bothered to vet Karla Sofia Gascón’s social media accounts before dropping a reported $30 million into an Oscar campaign is really something.
Netflix acquired Emilia Perez, a Spanish musical about a drug cartel kingpin (Gascón) who undergoes a sex change operation to become a woman, for about $8 million.
You see, Netflix is desperate for the status and legitimacy that come with winning a Best Picture Oscar, and this was the social justice hobby horse the company chose to ride.
You can see how this originally made sense. To prove how virtuous they are, Oscar voters love to vote for “social movement” movies and here was one sympathetic to transsexuals in the age of Donald Trump 2.0.
There was just one problem… When you do business with a 52-year-old fat guy running around pretending to be a woman, you might want to be proactive about unexploded landmines.
Turns out Karla Sofia Gascón (formerly Carlos Gascón) had quite a few landmines sitting and waiting to sabotage all of Netflix’s Oscar hopes and Oscar dreams. Xweets. Lots and lots of racist xweets.
This must be the most significant unforced error in Oscar history. Netflix spends millions without spending the equivalent of pennies to search the social media history of the filmmakers and stars? That’s nuts. And it’s not like we are still in the early days of social media before anyone thought of something so basic as a social media audit. Over and over again we have seen careers and reputations destroyed due to old jokes or immature postings or outright racist stuff. Did Netflix forget how a few harmless gay jokes killed comedian Kevin Hart’s dream of hosting the Oscars?
All Netflix had to do was audit Gascón’s xweets. All Gascón had to do was audit his own xweets or shut down the account entirely. How dumb are these people? Every dream Gascón had was weeks away from coming true. He wasn’t only going to win the Oscar, he was going to make history and watch his career soar into the sun. Every dream Netflix had was weeks away from coming true: all that Oscar gold.
Dumb.
The worst part, though, is what we are not supposed to say, and that’s this: It’s bad enough that a rare and career-making Best Actress nomination was stolen from a deserving woman by a guy. But now his and Netflix’s stupidity have basically disqualified this nomination. A nomination that could’ve boosted a real woman’s career is wasted because Netflix decided to make a lunatic the face of its Oscar campaign.
But maybe this is some form of cosmic justice. After a decade of all this un-American DEI and identity politics nonsense, we are watching this grift finally crumble to dust. It’s just a fact that Emilia Perez thrived due to identity politics and then imploded due to identity politics (racist tweets). With a 73 percent Rotten Tomato critics’ score and a pathetic 17 percent audience score, it’s no secret that merit had nothing to do with its 13 Oscar nominations.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.
