[Cet article a été publié le 23 janvier 2025, puis mis à jour après l’annonce des nominations et republié.] This January 23, after two postponements due to the fires which continue to ravage the region of Los Angeles, California, the Academy of Oscars revealed the list of nominees for its annual high mass, on March 3. As was expected, Emilia Perez, the film by Frenchman Jacques Audiard, won 13 nominations in total, including best female performance – and will perhaps make history. Because as already predicted The Hollywood Reporter before the nominations are announced: “If she was nominated, [Karla Sofía Gascón] would be well-positioned to be the first transgender person to win an Oscar.”
Headlining the film, the 52-year-old Spanish actress is helping to makeEmilia Perez a feature film that ticks all the boxes “to make Trump supporters cringe”, at the same time noted the Californian magazine, one of the reference readings in the Hollywood industry. Baroque production that is both a thriller and a musical, the film by Jacques Audiard features a Mexican narco (played by Karla Sofía Gascón), who hires a careerist lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) to help him fake his disappearance, organize his gender transition and ensure that his abandoned wife (Selena Gomez) does not lack of nothing.
A very heavy American context
Released in August in France, and in November on Netflix in the United States, Emilia Perez launched into the Oscar race in an extremely difficult context. On November 5, 2024, Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House, after having, among other things, promised to end what he calls a “transgender delirium” in the United States. And among all the decrees that he signed on January 20, barely invested, there is a text ordering the end of programs to promote diversity within the federal government. Another complicates administrative procedures for transgender people.
Since the presentation of the film in Cannes, in May 2024, and the quadruple Best Actress Award obtained jointly with Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz (who plays Emilia's new love), Karla Sofía Gascón has stopped counting the messages of hatred and death threats received on social networks. But she refuses to be intimidated, seeing in this nauseating flood the reflection of progress in the transgender cause.
“There is a part of society that lives on hatred, that lives by selling hatred, and there is another part that wants to live in hope, with the same rights, in peace and respect for everyone. I always considered it to be a fight between light and shadow. declares Karla Sofía Gascón, interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter which dedicated the front page of its edition dated January 9 to him. She continues:
“The brighter the light, the darker the shadows. I am public enemy number one to many people in the world right now.”
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The sweet taste of “vengeance”
In such a state of mind, the Spanish actress can only thrive on adversity. “I developed a taste for revenge,” she confirms to Hollywood magazine.
Karla Sofía Gascón, who made her gender transition official in 2018, in an autobiography published under her birth name (Karsia. An extraordinary story, unpublished in France), advised Jacques Audiard on his scenario, and led the Frenchman to clarify his representation of transidentity.
The Spaniard, unknown to the general public before Emilia Perez, just as easily sends away those who would like her to be selected for the Oscar for best male performance, on the grounds that she plays a man during part of the film: “It's like we told Dustin Hoffman when he did Tootsie, that she had to be nominated in the best actress category.” In this film by Sydney Pollack, released in 1982, the American actor plays an unemployed actor who cross-dresses as a woman to land a role in a soap opera.
Et “sa revenge”, Karla Sofía Gascón claims, among other things, to find it in the encounters she has every day, in the street. People who come up to her to thank her. “Something very beautiful is happening in society. A lot of people are waiting for me to be nominated somewhere. If I get this reward, they will jump for joy.”
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