Sometimes when you’re looking around for a column topic, one finds you instead. That happened Thursday night when I was checking my email.
I was reading “Reliable Sources,” a regular CNN newsletter about media and entertainment, when I came across this nugget:
Citing the website TheWrap, the newsletter said, “The Academy Awards will apparently avoid a looming embarrassment for this year’s show and won’t be asking any past winners to take to the stage and speak glowingly about ‘Emilia Pérez’ star and Best Actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón in the wake of the controversy over her racist and anti-Muslim tweets.”
That sentence contains a bunch of unanswered questions. Let’s go through them:
• “Emilia Pérez” is a Netflix movie that I had not heard of until the Oscar nominees were announced recently. I looked it up, and it’s a Spanish-language musical about a Mexican drug cartel boss who hires a lawyer to help him disappear so he can transition into a woman.
OK ... that’s imaginative. But I’m guessing there isn’t a cameo by any member of the Corleone family.
Meanwhile, the film won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and has been widely praised. It received 13 Oscar nominations and won four Golden Globe awards.
I’d be willing to watch it, but I’m having trouble figuring out how a film of this nature can work as a musical.
• Karla Sofía Gascón, the actress who plays the cartel boss, is being criticized for her online commentary several years ago. The backlash apparently has gotten so bad that she has lost whatever chance she had of winning the Best Actress award.
• Her online provocations ripped into everything and everybody. She criticized Islam, Christianity and Catholicism. She said very few people ever cared about George Floyd. She criticized the 2021 Oscars for giving supporting acting awards to a Black man and an Asian woman.
After a reporter found the comments, Gascón apologized. “As someone in a marginalized community, I know this suffering all too well,” she wrote.
She certainly should, because Gascón herself is the first transgender performer to be nominated for an Oscar. You cannot make this up. How does a transgender person criticize awards to two minorities?
It’s just another example of how people spill whatever comes to their mind onto the internet, where it lurks until it gets used against them.
Since the exposure of her comments, Netflix has stopped paying for Gascón’s travel during the ongoing awards season, and has removed her from promotional advertisements about the film. The director said he is no longer in contact with the actress, whom he sees as trying to play the victim.
Really, what a mess. Fortunately, the CNN newsletter contained another worthwhile nugget that does not have any sort of insane backstory.
There is a new TV show from Dan Fogelman, the creator of “This Is Us,” and it stars Sterling K. Brown, who played Randall Pearson, one of the “Big Three” triplets from 2016-22.
Citing a Variety report, the newsletter said that Fogelman’s show “Paradise” had a “heavenly opening week” on the Disney-plus and Hulu streaming services.
Its premiere episode drew 7 million viewers over nine days of streaming. When less than 1 million viewers per day is seen as a success, it tells you how fractured today’s TV audience is.
Brown, by the way, can trace his lineage to Amite County, where two of his great-grandparents lived in the early 1900s, according to the PBS show “Finding Your Roots.”
In “Paradise” he plays a Secret Service agent who is a murder suspect. Disney and Hulu have been promoting the show heavily, according to Variety. Hulu said the show’s TikTok page has had the most views and shares of all its new shows over the past year. Yay.
I root for all the “This Is Us” actors because it was such a great show. I watch Justin Hartley, who played Kevin, in the CBS show “Tracker,” which is middling at best in its second season but is finally showing some signs that it might be getting better.
And so far, there are no transgender cartel leaders in the show.
