Mudslinging Comes Back in Style
Dirty tricks and trolling campaigns return, this time with 'stans' often driving the narrative
Sundance is still in full swing in Park City for those hardy enough to brave the cold for that long, but much of the industry has already returned home and is gearing up for the next round of awards season mayhem. The Super Bowl may be the big televised event, but it will be a packed few days in Los Angeles with the AFI Luncheon and Critics Choice Awards on Feb. 7 and then the DGA and PGA Awards the following day. Though the Academy canceled its annual nominees luncheon originally scheduled for Monday, Feb. 10, many of this year’s nominees will be in town anyway, eager to get in front of voters before final Oscar voting starts that Tuesday.
I’ll be in L.A. too, hosting some live events for The Ankler as part of our screening series with Letterboxd — if you want to join me, and the team behind Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl next Saturday, send us your RSVP! — and reporting on a handful of those awards shows. But until then, I’m taking advantage of the lull, booking interviews with as many nominees as I can fit in and taking stock of the remaining four burning questions that will shape the next few weeks. (Questions 1-4 earlier this week addressed the best picture race from a few angles and the impact of the AI brouhaha on The Brutalist and other contenders.)
Today: Will every best actress nominee’s superfans wind up attacking another’s? Will anyone make a speech about Donald Trump? Will Conan O’Brien be unleashed to supersize the silly? Join me as we try to figure out what’s really meaningful and what’s just a lot of noise as days til final Oscar voting dwindle and the race gets serious. Let’s get into questions 5, 6, 7, 8!
Question 5: Is The Mudslinging Era Back?
Are we past the point where a celebrity’s old tweets can resurface and end their career — or their Oscar chances? We may be about to find out. Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofia Gascón had already caused a minor ruckus when she claimed in an interview that there were people “working around Fernanda Torres who talk badly about me.” This came a few days after Instagram tribute from Torres herself, praising Gascón’s kindness, generosity and talent and seemingly anticipating a situation in which the best actress nominees might be pitted against one another (“Let’s not create a situation to be against each other”).
But that dustup will seem like a minor blip compared to a collection of Gascón’s old tweets gathered by journalist Sarah Hagi and shared on X on Thursday, where she weighs in on everything from Muslims in her home country of Spain (“How many more times will history have to expel the Moors from Spain”) to the 2021 Oscars (“an ugly, ugly gala”).
Gascón released a statement via Netflix a few hours after the old tweets went viral. “I want to acknowledge the conversation around my past social media posts that have caused hurt,” she wrote. “As someone in a marginalized community, I know this suffering all too well and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain. All my life I have fought for a better world. I believe light will always triumph over darkness.”
This is just the latest round in what’s been a markedly heated week since the Oscar nominations came out. Torres, nominated for best actress for I’m Still Here, came in for her own round of scandal over the weekend, when some users on X dug up screenshots of her in Blackface from a Brazilian comedy sketch show that aired over 17 years ago. Torres swiftly apologized.
I won’t even pretend to know enough about Brazilian comedy to claim that Blackface was more acceptable or common then, but I do know that four years later Billy Crystal revived his blackface Sammy Davis Jr. sketch at the actual Oscars. And it was four years after that that Gascón’s Emilia Perez co-star Zoe Saldaña wore makeup to change her skin tone and play Nina Simone in the biopic Nina, which was seen by virtually no one but came in for a new round of controversy over the weekend too.
It’s hard to know how many Oscar votes might be swayed by any of this — I usually err on the side of believing that the Internet is not reality, though the Gascón tweets may actually be enough to break through. But all of this back and forth makes me think of the astute point The New York Times awards reporter Kyle Buchanan made a few days ago on Bluesky: “It’s funny that Oscar campaigns used to indulge in dirty tricks and whisper campaigns and now they don’t have to because obsessed stans do all the work.”
Are the dirty tricks and whisper campaigns famous from Harvey Weinstein’s heyday really over? Many of the top strategists working on this year’s awards campaigns got their start at the Weinstein Company, and though nobody will ever proudly take credit for mudslinging the way Weinstein or Scott Rudin used to, these tactics can still be effective. I still don’t think it was a studio that seeded the Brutalist AI story with the Timothée Chalamet fans who accelerated it into a multi-day scandal, but boy, did it work.
That said, I’m not sure any studio-led whisper campaign could be as funny, entertaining, or surprisingly scathing as Johane Sacrebleu, the 30-minute “musical tribute” to Emilia Pérez made by Mexican TikTok star Camila D. Aurora. It’s described on the film’s GoFundMe page as the story of “a trans woman heir to the largest baguette producer who tries to destroy the systematic racism of her country with her strongest weapon: love.” Gleefully embracing every French stereotype, from striped shirts to the film Ratatouille, it’s a pointed and funny rebuke to the Mexico-by-way-of-France world of Jacques Audiard’s musical drama. It’s filmed in Spanish and French and doesn’t have English subtitles, but you can probably get the idea.
Who knows how many Oscar votes this sways, particularly since the Emilia Pérez backlash memes have been going strong for months. But if Camila D. Aurora wants to make a Conclave or Anora parody next, I’d contribute to that GoFundMe just to see how it turns out.
Question 6: How Political Will Things Get?
I talked about this on the podcast last week, but it’s worth emphasizing the volatility of the current political moment, and how likely it is that Hollywood will wind up resuming its position in the anti-Trump resistance. Sundance is an early indicator that the industry might continue instead aim to skirt controversy. The festival that hosted its own Women’s March in 2017 has been light on political speech-making, despite the presence of more than a few films that tackle hot-button issues.
But who knows how many federal employees may be sacked between now and next weekend’s slew of awards season events, or how many more executive orders will sow chaos and despair among some of our country’s most vulnerable citizens. We’ve been frogs in a pot of water since the election, and the past week has sure felt like being brought to a boil. Even in a Hollywood that’s quietly eager to toe the MAGA line, is the pressure going to become too much?
Our answer will likely come at next Friday’s Critics Choice Awards — rescheduled twice from its original Jan. 12 date thanks to the wildfires and now very relevant, as the only televised awards show between now and the start of final Oscar voting. (The BAFTA awards, important in their own right, will air before voting closes on February 18.)
I’ll be attending Critics Choice and keeping an eye on some potential victories that could upset the Oscar state of play. If Edward Norton is surging in the supporting actor race, we might find out there. Ditto for his Complete Unknown co-star Chalamet, though among this group of critics The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody might still have the edge.
Even among expected winners, the speeches themselves could have a bit more power than they did at the Golden Globes. Might Zoe Saldaña, whose parents were born in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, have something to say in the time of ICE raids? Could Jesse Eisenberg win best original screenplay for A Real Pain and connect his film about the Holocaust to lessons about standing up to authoritarianism before it’s too late?
At the Golden Globes, we weren’t yet in the second Trump era, but we emphatically are now. As much as Hollywood’s bigwigs may want to continue to avoid political conflict, I suspect awards season won’t be able or willing.
Question 7: Will Box Office Matter?
Here’s something more fun than speculating about the future of our federal government: There are box office hits in awards season! Yes, the prestige film market is not what it used to be, as my colleague Richard Rushfield has lamented as he comes home from Sundance, but there are bright spots among this year’s Oscar contenders that are not Wicked or Dune: Part Two.
Cracking last week’s box office top 10, for example, were A Complete Unknown — five weeks into its run and with $74 million worldwide in the bank — as well as The Brutalist, which finally expanded to more than 1,000 screens and has already outgrossed its $10 million budget. Just outside the top 10 but on the brink of becoming the biggest hit in Focus Features’ history is Nosferatu, with more than $166 million grossed worldwide.
These are not Oppenheimer numbers or even Lincoln numbers (would you believe that Lincoln made $275 million globally?). But its box office success certainly contributes to the sense that A Complete Unknown is surging and might yet become the consensus pick to rival frontrunner Emilia Pérez. Then of course there’s still Wicked, with its 10 Oscar nominations and more than $700 million in global box office. If you believe that picking a popular movie is the key to keeping the Oscars relevant — and I know plenty of people do — it may be the choice for best picture.
Most likely, as in most years, we’ll get a mixed bag of hits and totally obscure indies in our Oscar winners. Documentary feature frontrunner No Other Land, after all, doesn’t even have a distributor. But if Wicked or even Dune Part Two have stronger Oscar nights than expected, we might have to start crediting the long tail of Barbenheimer for a new era of box office hits taking the stage at the Dolby.
Question 8: What Will the Oscars Themselves Look Like?
We know Conan O’Brien will be onstage, and that the performers of the nominated original songs will not. We know the telecast producers find a way to pay tribute to the victims of the Los Angeles wildfires, and that the Academy intends to put on a ceremony that will honor the “beauty and resilience” of Hollywood’s home city. And, in news I was particularly thrilled to hear, we know the show will bring back the “Fab 5” presentations in some categories — in which previous winners pay tribute to the nominees.
The rest, for now, remains a mystery, and a high-stakes one as the Oscars try to build on last year’s Barbenheimer ratings bump. I don’t usually care much about the Oscar ratings, both because I don’t work for ABC or the Academy and because I really don’t believe TV ratings are the point of a ceremony that’s about the best in film. But I also want everyone to love the Oscars as much as I do, and I would be thrilled for the presence of Wicked or even smaller hits like Conclave and The Substance to inspire some people to tune into the ceremony for the first time in years.
Knowing that O’Brien is as capable and welcoming a host as you can get these days, I hope the Academy feels free to indulge in real spectacle, the kind of thing that we didn’t see as much of in the Jimmy Kimmel-hosted years. Give us montages and tributes! Show us clips of the emotional speeches from the Governors Awards in November.
There won’t be original song performances, but since Wicked didn’t have any, that doesn’t mean we can’t see a little bit of Oz-level splendor onstage. For that matter, “Pump It Up” from The Substance wasn’t an original song either, but Margaret Qualley and her leotard could absolutely make an appearance. Sure, it’s not easy to get major stars to take part in planned bits at the Oscars — it’s not easy to get some of the biggest ones even to show up — but with Hollywood facing pretty much chronic existential crisis, isn’t this the year to try?
Vis-a-vis mudslinging. The days of gossip column monopolies is long gone. Bye-bye Hedda, Louella and Walter. Hello talent agency sharpies and lawyers slinging away. And the ubiquitous influencers, TikTokers, Instagramers etc, etc. Are we having fun yet?
They couldn’t find an actual film star to host?