Wow, the transgender Oscar frontrunner isn't Woke?

Who could have imagined some Spanish dude who told his wife and child he's now a woman has sabotaged the Academy Awards with Musk-like tweets?

Combining my last two posts, “Why are late onset M-to-F transgenders usually rightists?” and “Cancel Culture is still alive,” there is the amusing story of former Oscar frontrunner, the French musical Emilia Perez, which garnered 13 nominations, as many as Gone With the Wind, suddenly cratering in the Academy Award race due to its ex-man star revealing himself as a deplorable right-winger.

Most notably, Spaniard Juan Carlos Gascón (whose wife bore him a child in 2011)

was nominated for Best Actress under his new name of Karla Sofía Gascón, which he’d assumed in his mid-40s, for playing an El Chapo-like Mexican cartel boss who decides to become an ex-man.

In the early 1980s, it was common to make movies with movie stars playing the opposite sex, such Julia Andrews in Victor/Victoria, Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, and Barbra Streisand in Yentl. While prestigious at the time, most of these movies suffered from their implausibility because film stars tend to be exemplars of their own sex.

For example, Tootsie was one of the best cast movies ever with Jessica Lange, Teri Garr, Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning, Bill Murray, and Sydney Pollack knocking the lights out in the supporting cast. But Dustin Hoffman pretending to be a female actress was an unfortunate farce because, while Hoffman was not the most masculine of his generation of movie stars, such as Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Kris Kristofferson, Sylvester Stallone, and so forth, Hoffman was extremely non-feminine.

In contrast, the peak of 1980s trangenderism was ultra-WASP lesbian dwarf Linda Hunt winning the 1982 Best Supporting Actress award for playing the half-white-half-Asian dwarf Billy Kwan who is Mel Gibson’s photographer in The Year of Living Dangerously. Note that Hunt’s Oscar went to her actual sex. Voters back then didn’t pretend she was a different sex. Linda Hunt was really good at pretending to be somebody else than she was.

But with Gascón, Academy voters are shocked that a man pretending to be a woman is not woke. From the Washington Post:

How did the imploding ‘Emilia Pérez’ Oscar campaign get this bad?

Ever since offensive tweets from star Karla Sofía Gascón surfaced, the awards front-runner’s fortunes have plummeted. Here’s what Hollywood thinks about it.

February 7, 2025 at 7:05 p.m. ESTYesterday at 7:05 p.m. EST

By Jada Yuan

Oscar season can experience dramatic swings, but rarely has a celebrated film gone into free fall as quickly as “Emilia Pérez.”

Everything seemed to be going right for Netflix’s Spanish-language musical about drug violence, gender transition and much, much more — at least when Oscar nominations were announced on Jan. 23.

Celebrated at Cannes and fresh off a best motion picture (musical or comedy) win at the Golden Globes, French directing legend Jacques Audiard’s film received 13 Oscar nominations, a record for a non-English-language film and one short of the overall record for any film (just behind “All About Eve,” “Titanic” and “La La Land”).

Then, on Jan. 30, journalist Sarah Hagi resurfaced an archive of racist, Islamophobic tweets from the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón — who had just become the first openly transgender performer to be nominated for an Oscar. An uproar was immediate. In response, Gascon has defended herself, at length, in social media posts and interviews that she reportedly did not coordinate with the public relations team behind “Emilia Pérez.” In a highly unusual development, Netflix is now promoting the movie to Oscar voters not only without its lead — who plays the title character — but without even her name or image. It’s become an “Emilia Pérez” Oscar campaign without Emilia Pérez.

In the operatic, Spanish-language film, Gascón plays a Mexican cartel boss who transitions to being a woman. Characters sing and rap their way through Mexican markets and fundraising galas, all shot with dizzying visual flair as the tone swings from drama to straight-up telenovela. As critics have noted, it looks and feels like nothing many viewers have ever seen.

But this film about tolerance, acceptance and the limits of redemption is now sinking beneath the weight of its lead actress’s past comments, not to mention the ways she’s handled the backlash. .

With the six-day Oscars voting window starting Feb. 11, and a string of crucial awards ceremonies looming this weekend, Gascon’s controversy may prove fatal not only for her own Academy Awards chances but in other categories where “Emilia Pérez” looked competitive. “According to my Facebook and the Academy members who are being vocal about it, people are like, ‘I am going to write my governors [representatives from each branch of the Academy] and tell them to rescind the nomination,’” said a producer and Academy member … “I mean, people are really upset about Karla.”

Gascón’s tweets, written in Spanish and posted from 2016 to 2023, expressed critical views of Muslims, George Floyd, diversity at the Oscars and China’s role in the covid pandemic. “I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler,” she wrote, “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.”

What makes the Woke maddest is when you say something reasonable.

In another she called the Oscars an “ugly” gala, writing, “More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films, I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M.” …

Gascón’s comments about Muslims (for example, tweeting that Islam was “becoming a hotbed of infection for humanity that urgently needs to be cured”) have struck a particularly sour note with some people in film circles given the ongoing tumult in Gaza, said the producer who’s an Academy member.

Sue Obeidi, a senior vice president at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which advocates for accurate depictions of Muslims in Hollywood, highlighted a tweet in which Gascón called for the banning of religions “such as Islam” that “go against European values and violate human rights.”

As I pointed out in my previous SteveSailer.net post, when a man with a wife and kids like Gascon announces in middle age that he’s really a woman, more often than not his politics are right-of-center.

Is there still time to unsink this ship? Maybe, if Gascón issues a more unequivocal apology, or if everyone on the team even more publicly distances themselves from her. Or, perhaps, the analyst points out, she may get a resurgence of support from conservative and contrarian members of the Academy who oppose “cancel culture.” .

“There absolutely are a ton of Trumpers in the Academy,” says the analyst. “The fundamental myth of Hollywood is that it’s a liberal, progressive place.”

A fascinating quadruple bankshot theory.

In reality, Hollywood’s legion of Trumpers don’t seem to show up on voting maps.