‘Emilia Pérez’ Tops the Biggest Scandals in Oscars History

Much like Emilia Pérez’s titular heroine, a reformed cartel capo who keeps her identity hidden after undergoing gender reassignment surgery for fear of retribution, this year’s most-nominated Oscar contender was always going to have a target on its back.

Picking up steam throughout the year, Netflix’s quirky modern musical that’s told mostly in Spanish went mainstream when it crushed the Golden Globes with eight wins—including best musical or comedy motion picture.

But so, too, did its detractors. The LGBTQ+ community’s concerns that (as GLAAD put it in November 2024) the lead’s “transition is framed as an absolution” and Mexicans’ anger at seeing their country portrayed in such a savage and stereotypical manner became bigger talking points throughout the fall and winter. The fever pitch happened when Emilia Pérez star (and best actress Oscar nominee) Karla Sofía Gascón’s hateful tweets resurfaced, followed by a clumsy apology tour that was not always sanctioned by Netflix PR and the film’s director (and best director Oscar nominee) Jacques Audiar bluntly distanced himself from her in return.

Gascón’s old Tweets were made public on Jan. 30, a week after the Oscar nominations were announced but several weeks before final voting happens on Feb. 18. Some have called for Gascón to withdraw from the Oscar race or questioned why Netflix didn’t do a thorough background check before the awards campaign started. But the truth is, we’ve been here before.

The Daily Beast’s Obsessed spoke with film historians, journalists including Susan King and Kristen Lopez, and other awards buffs to gather a history of the biggest Oscar campaign scandals—as well as how any backlash to them impacted their trophy dreams.

How does the current Emilia Pérez controversy rank among them? We’d say pretty close to the top: This may be the biggest scandal in Oscar campaign history because it mixes cultural criticism with social media footprints.

“A lot of people are now feeling more justified in saying, ‘See, I told you it was always bad,’” Lopez says of the turning tides of those who were previously afraid to dislike the film for fear of not looking hip or progressive. “It’s a little bit different than what we’ve seen with backlash against Oscar films in the past.”

At the same time, King points out that there are similarities with past scandals; that “it’s somebody now finding these tweets” as opposed to when the film premiered in May at Cannes or before it premiered in November on Netflix.

Read through this roundup of past dust-ups, and you be the judge.

The Nominee: Chill Wills, supporting actor, The Alamo

The Scandal: By the 33rd Academy Awards in 1961, Wills was a seasoned character actor who knew that this was probably his last shot at winning an Oscar. So he did something that was unseemly for the time and hired a publicist. Wojciechowicz “Bow Wow” Wojtkiewicz placed an ad in The Hollywood Reporter that showed Wills in costume, superimposed over a still of other actors from the film, that read, “We of the Alamo cast are praying harder—than the real Texans prayed for their lives in the Alamo—for Chill Wills to win the Oscar,” and was signed, “Your Alamo Cousins.”

Wills fired Wojtkiewicz, but the damage was done. Academy member Groucho Marx clapped back with his own ad, which read, “Dear Mr. Chill Wills, I am delighted to be your cousin, but I voted for Sal Mineo [for Exodus].”

The Result: The Alamo lost all but one of its seven nominations, with Gordon E. Sawyer and Fred Hynes taking home the award for best sound. Peter Ustinov from Spartacus received the supporting actor award.

The Nominee: Margaret Avery, supporting actress, The Color Purple

The Scandal: Many assumed that Avery would be recognized for her memorable work as blues singer Shug Avery in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the Alice Waters novel. Then she placed a confusing ad in the trades that showed her in character and included a letter to God that, among other things, was written in a dialect that some considered offensive and also that didn’t match her or the character.

The Result: The Color Purple lost all 11 of its nominations. The supporting actress trophy that year went to Anjelica Huston for Prizzi’s Honor.

The Nominee: Kevin Costner, director, Dances with Wolves

The Scandal: Entertainment news desks began to get bizarre, anonymous phone calls in the lead-up to the 1991 Academy Awards as the Hollywood rumor mill perpetuated the story that it was Costner’s friend and eventual Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves director Kevin Reynolds who actually helmed this Western. A week after the ceremony, Reynolds wrote a letter to the editor at the Los Angeles Times to clarify that while he had been on the Wolves set where “I shot second-unit material for a couple of different sequences in the picture” and “also played a lot of cards,” the full director’s credit should go to the other Kevin.

The Result: Wolves won seven of its 12 nominations, including Best Director.

The Nominee: The People vs. Larry Flynt

The Scandal: All press is good press? Gloria Steinheim wrote a New York Times op-ed in January 1997, not long after Larry Flynt’s wide release, that took issue with director Miloš Forman’s story about the controversial porn king and his pursuit of First Amendment rights (among other things). She wrote that “a pornographer is not a hero, no more than a publisher of Ku Klux Klan books or a Nazi on the Internet, no matter what constitutional protection he secures. And Mr. Flynt didn’t secure much.”

Soon after, Variety ran an ad from an anonymous source that denounced the film. This became the industry cocktail hour’s equivalent of Deep Throat as everyone speculated as to who the anonymous poster could be (someone from another studio? A politico? One of the real Flynt’s many adversaries?). It didn’t help the rumor mill that this was followed a few weeks later by an ad from the ACLU that celebrated the movie.

The Result: Both Forman and lead actor Woody Harrelson were nominated for Oscars that year. They lost to, respectively, Anthony Minghella from The English Patient and Geoffrey Rush from Shine.

The Nominee: Shakespeare in Love

The Scandal: Considered the turning point for awards campaigning, the Shakespeare in Love versus Saving Private Ryan grudge match was a gloves-off battle.

According to journalist Michael Schulman’s book Oscar Wars A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, the feud really dates back to Shakespeare producer Harvey Weinstein’s beef with Ryan director Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List (the Holocaust drama beat Weinstein’s Miramax-backed The Piano for Best Picture and Best Director, despite the uber-producer’s multiple attempts to thwart it). Plus, Weinstein really wanted to claim a producing Oscar; even if it meant pushing aside fellow Shakespeare producer Edward Zwick.

During the Shakespeare and Ryan year, excessive ad buying, some mudslinging and extensive publicity opportunities (Hillary Clinton, then the First Lady of the United States, hosted the New York premiere of Shakespeare) resulted in what some now consider to be an upset.

The Result: Shakespeare in Love received seven of its 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Best Actress recipient Gwyneth Paltrow famously thanked Weinstein in her acceptance speech.

The Nominee: A Beautiful Mind

The Scandal: Director Ron Howard’s biographical drama about the brilliant mind, and mental disorder, of mathematician John Nash seemed to have everything going for it, even if it wasn’t always historically accurate: a love story, a charismatic lead in Russell Crowe, a stacked supporting cast, a surprise twist for anyone who didn’t know who Nash was …

Around the time of that year’s Golden Globes, journalist Matt Drudge reported that the queer liaisons mentioned in A Beautiful Mind’s source material, author Sylvia Nasar’s similarly named biography on Nash, were omitted from this story. In March of that year, he argued that the film also neglected to include the anti-Semetic remarks Nash reportedly made at the height of his schizophrenia.

Universal Pictures, which released the film, called the attacks a smear campaign with then-chairman Stacey Snider telling The Hollywood Reporter that “lines that should be clear to all of us have recklessly been crossed.”

The Result: A Beautiful Mind won four of its eight nominations, including best picture.

The Nominee: Martin Scorsese, director, Gangs of New York

The Scandal: Shots were fired in February 2003 when Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman penned a Variety op-ed under the headline “Crashing the Party for Poor Marty.” There, he argued that Scorsese, who had yet to receive a directing Oscar, didn’t deserve one for this film.

In March of that year, Los Angeles Times reported that Miramax Film Corp. which co-financed and released Gangs, had “enlisted Oscar-winning director and former Academy president Robert Wise to write an opinion column strongly recommending Scorsese for the best-director award.” The problems? The piece was then used as copy for an advertisement in the trades and newspapers and Wise also admitted that he didn’t fully write the article himself.

Several Academy members who had already voted asked to have their ballots returned for a redo (it didn’t happen). And seasoned awards publicist Murray Weissman eventually fessed up to writing the piece.

The Result: Gangs lost all 10 of its nominations with The Pianist’s Roman Polanski taking the best director honor.

The Nominee: Roman Polanski, director, The Pianist

The Scandal: Polanski is a French-born, Polish-raised Jew who narrowly survived the Holocaust while losing his mother to the horrors. So it makes sense that his Holocaust-centric film The Pianist would come from a personal place. Polanski also, famously, skipped out of Los Angeles before he could be sentenced in a trial for unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Living in exile in France in 2003, he couldn’t even attend that year’s Oscar ceremony. In attempting to separate the man from his art, the survivor of Polanski’s assault wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times titled “Judge the Movie, Not the Man.”

The Result: Polanski received the Oscar for best director that year. In 2018, as the #MeToo movement was taking down Hollywood insiders like Harvey Weistein and Bill Cosby, the Academy expelled Polanski.

The Nominee: Zero Dark Thirty

The Scandal: Inevitably, a story about the years-long hunt for Osama bin Laden and the interrogation of his (possible) associates is going to be a hard watch. The main criticism with this film was its depiction of torture, both for the uncomfortably raw way it was shown on screen and, for some viewers, questions of whether those scenes were even accurate. It also stirred the debate on whether torture is either necessary or effective.

Coming out during the 2012 election year, some Republican lawmakers also wondered if there was a symbiotic relationship between the Obama Administration (which took down bin Laden in May 2011) and notoriously left-leaning Hollywood. Allegations included that the filmmakers were given access to classified information and that the film’s intended October release date was meant to boost the president’s reelection campaign. (Distributor Columbia Pictures moved the film to a limited release in December 2012 before a nationwide roll-out).

The Result: Zero Dark Thirty lost four of its five Oscar nominations, with Paul N. J. Ottosson receiving the award for sound editing.

The Nominee: American Hustle

The Scandal: Director and co-writer David O. Russell’s heightened retelling of the FBI’s Abscam sting operation was, if nothing else, fun. It had sexy ’70s costumes and Jennifer Lawrence dancing. But more people paid attention to its casual racism as well as its questionable accuracy—especially since both were mined for laughs—as the film rose in popularity during the 2013-14 awards season.

The Result: American Hustle lost all 10 of its Oscar categories, including Best Picture.

The Nominee: Green Book

The Scandal: The historical biographical film is based on co-writer Nick Vallelonga’s father’s courtside seat to the abject racism of the 1960s as he drove pianist Dr. Don Shirley to concert performances through the Deep South. But Shirley’s family maintained that much of this story was fiction, a debate that got more play the more the film succeeded during the 2018-19 award season. Vallelonga told Variety in January 2019 that Shirley approved the script before his death in 2013 and also that the musician expressly told him not to talk to his family.

The Result: Green Book won three of its eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.