Last week, Selena Gomez sat down for a panel discussion at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. As one of the stars of the film, Emilia Perez, she's been hitting red carpets and giving interviews for months now. They're trying to drum up awards season support for the Netflix movie musical. It's got 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. It's the most of any film this year. So you could say the campaign has proved extremely successful, though I'm not sure you'd be able to tell from the mood in Santa Barbara.

I just want to know, how are you? How are you doing right now?

Thank you very much. I'm. I'm good. I'm really good. Some of that magic has disappeared, but I choose to continue to be proud of what I've done. And I'm just. I'm just grateful. I live with no regrets. And I would do this movie over and over again if I could.

If you thought that sounded a bit like, I don't know, a concession speech. As someone who covers presidential elections, I'm right there with you. In case you haven't been following the Oscars drama this year, I'm going to catch you up. In January, Emilia Perez won a Golden Globe and its lead trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon gave one of those like inspiring speeches that you see at awards ceremonies where they're kind of like riding the energy straight to Oscars glory.

The light always wins over darkness.

But then.

Oscar nominee Karla Sofia Gascon is vowing not to bow out of the race for best actress, despite growing scandal over her social media posts. The controversy arose after journalists shared screenshots of Gascon's now deleted tweets which led to accusations of racism and Islamophobia.

So we have a case of an Oscar campaign taken down by tweets. But here's the thing. We can learn a lot about the state of play when it comes to running a good Oscar campaign by what's happening with this very bad one with Emilia Perez. I'm Audie Cornish. And this is The Assignment. It took a while, but last week, Netflix's chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, finally responded to the controversy surrounding Gascon's tweets. The takeaways? Well, first, she called it, quote, a bummer. She also emphasized that Netflix awards team ran a great campaign, but suggested that going forward, they'd be reevaluating the process. Well, few people can break down the basics of an Oscar campaign better than my guest. Michael Schulman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of a book called "Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears."

So I tend to want to look at Harvey Weinstein and Miramax and the big Oscar campaigns I grew up with in the mid to late 90s because that I've heard was a turning point, was it?

So the longest chapter in the book ended up being about Harvey Weinstein in the 90s and specifically the best picture race in 1999 between Shakespeare in Love, which was from Weinstein's company, Miramax, and Saving Private Ryan, which was from Dreamworks, the studio created by Steven Spielberg. And it was his big war epic that was a kind of tribute to his father and his father's generation and the greatest generation. And it came out in the summer of 1998 and was immediately thought of as the frontrunner for the Oscar.

Cause it's a war picture epic. Tom Hanks. I think they play it still every year, like on TVs somewhere at some point. And Shakespeare in Love was seen as something kind of light and frothy, but it had in it this child of Hollywood and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Yeah. And it came out much later in the year, came out in December when, you know, Saving Private Ryan had been out there as the frontrunner. And Shakespeare in Love just kind of shook up the race and gave people something new to focus on. And then more crucially, Weinstein waged a very aggressive Oscar campaign on its behalf. A lot of things happened. You know, he was, you know, putting Gwyneth Paltrow everywhere. She was being interviewed all over the place. Like being on magazine covers, you know. You couldn't drive in L.A. without hearing the score of Shakespeare in Love play on the radio.

'Which hilariously, I can't remember a single thing about now, which I think kind of sums it up, right? I mean, the way I think of it is you had like in the early 90s, My Left Foot, which was this like amazing film with Daniel Day-Lewis, and it was one of Harvey Weinstein's first and biggest Oscar campaigns. And back then it felt like indie films versus big studio films. But by the time you get to the late 90s, Miramax really knows what it's doing. And what are the beats of their Oscar campaign in approach? How much is it about the star who's in it and getting them to go around and shake every hand? How much of it is like dopey technical stuff, like getting people to see the film? Like what were the beats of that strategy?

'It was all of the above and more and more and more of it. You know, basically the 1999 campaign for Shakespeare in Love was the culmination of a playbook that Miramax had been honing for the previous decade. And if you look at, you know, let it just be said off the bat, you know, Harvey Weinstein was doing far worse things during this decade than, you know, campaigning too hard for Oscars and annoying everyone. And we learned that much later. But, you know, from his perspective, Miramax was an indie company based in New York that made, like edgy movies, you know, like Pulp Fiction. And he always said he wanted to break out of the arthouse ghetto. So how would he do that? Partly it was by winning Oscars and getting exposure through the Academy Awards. And so there were a lot of things involved in this playbook. One of them was he was really great at finding a kind of mascot for the movie or attaching the movie to some kind of humanitarian campaign. For instance, My Left Foot, which you mentioned, you know, this was a 1989 movie. So pretty early on in Miramax's life. And he had in 1990, he had the star of the movie Daniel Day-Lewis, go to Congress and and testify in support of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And it could get very cynical. You know, for instance, his last big Oscar campaign before the scandal broke was for this movie Lion, which starred a very adorable little Indian actor named Sunny Pawar. So this was during the 2016 election year. And he had you know, this kid was coming from India and had a bit of red tape problems trying to get to the premiere in New York of the movie. And so after the election, Weinstein placed an ad with this little cute boy's face on it that said, you know, "It took so much effort to get Sunny Pawar to the premiere of Lion. Next year, he may not be so lucky." Something like that.

One of the things I think about is the legacy from that period, some of which you've just described, creating a narrative and attaching it to a progressive or some kind of idealism, right? Some kind of cause to say this is not just a film, this is capital I important. There's this other aspect of it which is just getting people to see it, which isn't the same as it used to be with streaming. But before it's like you had to rent a theater and then later it was like, We're going to send out VHS tapes. We're going to send out DVDs. Like we're going to make sure everyone ever has a copy of this film. So there are those, like weird technical things like that.

Absolutely. But just like a political campaign, there's kind of two sides to it. There's the messaging, you know, the stuff that a speechwriter writes for a candidate or a publicist, you know, helps, you know, craft for an actress on the campaign trail for best actress. And there's also the ground game. You know, and in political campaigns, it's knocking on doors and making calls, whatever. In the Oscar race, it's getting people to watch your movie and, you know, even go to parties and shake hands with the director or the star of your movie. You know, this kind of thing is now all sort of banned by the academy because at certain point, the Academy had to step in and start start making rules.

I didn't realize that, yeah, like some of these techniques aren't allowed.

'Yeah. I mean, I mean, 1999 again was the turning point year. I mean, and really what made it so ugly was another thing we haven't talked about, which was negative campaigning. What Weinstein was doing and his own staff doesn't seem to know that he was doing this, you know, among other things they don't know -- they claim to know he wasn't doing. He would call journalists and and say stuff like, don't you think Saving Private Ryan is just just good for the first 25 minutes? That the storming of the beach of Normandy scene and after that it's kind of a standard World War two drama like we've seen before? You're not supposed to do that. Unlike political campaigns. You're not supposed to negative campaign. You're not. No one's placing attack ads because it's all one big, you know, film community and you're supposed to be celebrating the art form. But, you know, this line of attack reached the people at Dreamworks and they were furious. And they started pushing back, not in a negative way, but they were you know, they they.

All of a sudden their defense.

They're placing even more ads. They actually outspent Miramax in the end. And on Oscar night, when Shakespeare in Love won, there was this eruption of resentment in Hollywood because people thought that, it's now become like Washington. It's it's become about the biggest, most expensive campaign rather than the movie, which I think is arguable. You know, there were a lot of good reasons why people love Shakespeare in love. It's about it's about showbusiness. It's about it's about actors. And, you know, it's.

But also Michael Schulman. Don't sell me on Shakespeare in Love. It's been done before. And I still resent it now that I've learned all of this about this Oscar campaign. Right.

But what it got boiled down to was Harvey cheated and the wrong movie won, and then suddenly everyone in Hollywood felt like they had to take the Weinstein playbook, as it was called, and use it on their own behalf or outdo it. And so that's how the campaign ecosystem became so bloated and so expensive. And that's when the Academy started stepping in, like basically doing campaign finance reform. Like you actually you're actually going to ban some of this stuff.

So what happened when the streamers came to town? All of a sudden you have a moneyed class of film production support. They also control a form of distribution, right, in that they can stream their films. When do we first see streamers kind of upend this conversation?

'Around 2016-ish is when you know, the, you know, like Amazon and Netflix really started to enter the Oscar race in a serious way. And Netflix in particular, has been an interesting story to watch over the past decade or so because they have an entire awards department, which is run by an alumnus of of Miramax.

And this is very important because later we're going to talk about Emilia Perez, the film right now that is faltering in its Oscar campaign.

And they would put a ton of money behind movies like Roma. You would just see that movie everywhere. There were so many ads, so many billboards, so many TV commercials for it. It was a gigantic campaign.

And the incentive for them is different because unlike the movie studios, which, you know, this is their business, streamers are just trying to draw eyeballs and subscribers? Right? This sort of like

So are big movie studios. You know, big movie studios they want they want box office. But, you know, sometimes the movies have been out for six months and they just want prestige. I think ultimately what's driving people to try to win Oscars, it's not a purely bottom line thing. I think people in Hollywood want the validation of the Oscar or as as this one veteran executive Terry Press, who actually ran the Saving Private Ryan campaign, told me I asked her the reason why people want Oscars and she said, "Ego and bragging rights. It's a town built on a rock solid foundation of insecurity." And I think for Netflix, what they wanted was to establish themselves as a player in the Prestige film zone. And so you see them like doing, I mean, they have a lot of crappy movies on Netflix, but they also are, you know, bringing in great filmmakers like Alfonso Cuaron and, you know, Jane Campion, who made The Power of the Dog and, you know, banging huge drum for these movies that are really arthouse movies.

I'm speaking with New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman. We'll be back in a moment. So that brings us to this year's story, the rise and fall of the French made musical Emilia Perez, which currently has a Rotten tomatoes score of 72% with critics and 17% with the audience. The plot of this film is the story of a drug cartel leader who goes through a gender transition. But it's also a musical, but it's also in Spanish.

It's a lot of things. A lot of things all mashed up together.

Yeah. And I'll be honest with you, as I was reading into the reaction of this, I noticed right away that, like the folks at GLAD, for example, did not see it as some amazing depiction of trans life experience. Right away you're seeing not great reviews out of Mexico. You were hearing this kind of backlash to the actual quality of the film, and we won't debate that here. But that is overridden by the narrative that is kind of put out there by Netflix in trying to drum up interest for the film. Right. And I hear in that narrative the things you were mentioning, right? This this combination of a story about a particular figure or in this case, like the mascot, who is the the Spanish actor who plays this trans character. And then you also have the sort of storyline around that, a kind of halo of progressivism around that. What happened? When does that start to falter?

Well, I think back to probably the apex of the Emilia Perez Oscar campaign, which was the Golden Globes in early January.

Which is supposed to be the start of many campaigns. Right. This is where you show like, look, we've got the juice and the momentum. It's it's a film.

Maybe it's like Super Tuesday. It's one stop along the way. I mean, it starts back in like the film festivals. Sundance, Cannes, Toronto.

It was very awarded. It was very awarded at Cannes.

Yeah. And then there's like critics awards at the end of the year. And then the first thing that happens after New Year's is the Golden Globes, where Emilia Perez won a lot of things. It won best musical or comedy. And the last person to speak in that speech when it won was Karla Sofia Gascon, the trans star of the movie. And they very deliberately gave her the last speech. And she said something like, You can

You can maybe put us in jail, You can beat us up but you never can take away our soul, our existence, or identity.

'It was meant to be an inspiring speech that made people who are maybe perplexed by the movie itself and what the movie was saying to think, this is actually a movie that I can vote for out of a sense of acceptance and open mindedness. And especially on the eve of the Trump administration coming in off of an extremely anti-trans campaign season. Voting for Emilia Perez is a way of affirming something. Right.

Which gets back to the thing you brought back way at the start, where, as you said, a vote for this random movie musical becomes something more because of the presentation and the centering of this actor. And it's really wild to me now thinking about just how established Netflix and their Oscar campaign department is in it having roots in the Weinstein era.

Yeah, absolutely. But the funny thing about it is that they have never won best picture. It's every year it's like Lucy with the football or something. They get so close, you know. Roma lost. The Power of the Dog. Actually, the Power of the Dog lost to Coda from Apple, which then became the first streamer to win best picture. And both of those studios at the time spent more on the campaigns than the actual movie cost to make. So they have been trying and trying and trying and it seemed like they finally had a winner in Emilia Perez, which then after the Golden Globes was nominated for 13 Oscars. And and then it kind of all just imploded. And it's been something to watch.

And it imploded over tweets, which is I find almost throwback in the post Twitter age, you know, now now that Twitter is X, etc., and is this, quote unquote, bastion of free speech. But Gascon was found to have these tweets in which she called George Floyd a drug addict swindler, called the 2021 Oscars, A Black Lives Matter demonstration, starts having little musings about Muslims in Spain and that sort of thing.

Oh she was tweeting. She was tweeting about anything and everything.

Yeah. Yeah. I was like, you don't even need to tweet any more. I don't know what this is. But the point is, delete your tweets. And the thing I wondered is what were we looking at in this campaign breakdown, not just from Netflix, but from the public reaction? How did it sort of snowball?

What I would say is, first of all. Emilia, as I always felt, was a weak frontrunner for the Oscars because it's very polarizing. A lot of people don't like it, actively don't like it. It already also had this backlash from, you know, people in Mexico, from trans viewers. But I never thought that anything would hit it like these these tweets that resurfaced. By the way.

Yeah, it was like going through an asteroid belt.

Yeah. Any public figure who hears the word resurfaced? Just, you know, you're about to have a bad day. But, you know, what was so damaging about it was that, as we said, she had been made the face of the campaign. The title character, Emilia Perez, becomes the main liability for the movie and an ongoing liability because she kept apologizing every day. And it's like these long, rambling, emotional apologies that were also extremely defensive. And she kept saying that there was a basically a plot to to sully her good name. I do think she was receiving a lot of hate online as any trans person who's in the public eye does. But, you know, there was no excusing these tweets. There was no getting around it. It seemed like such a fatal flaw in this campaign.

So a social media we're learning this from the Blake Lively lawsuit against Justin Baldoni in the campaigning just for that film, just its regular promotional campaign. Your reputation can be taken down fairly easily in some ways that I didn't expect or understand. You know, I learned in the reporting there that PR people kind of go into the Reddit threads and start badmouthing a film. Right. Or badmouthing an actor in the film. What does negative campaigning look like now? Even if Gascon wasn't a victim of it in this case, it feels like it's very easy to push that snowball down the hill.

Yeah, it's a really good question. And I've heard it asked, was this, you know, a negative attack? You know, it's really hard to say because, you know, there's no evidence that it was and it didn't need to be. You know, there are journalists, there are regular people online. There's fans. You don't need, you know, some shady, you know, campaign operator to be doing it when the internet can do it for you and spread things on social media. But the thing that you're right to bring up the Justin Baldoni Blake Lively matter because what we learned from that is that there are people who are hired to Astroturf Reddit and turn public sentiment against public figures, and it's easy to do.

I love how you're borrowing from politics, right like Astroturf, this idea that it's not a grassroots campaign, it's Astroturf. But yeah, there's people like that's their job. Go and make this thing look like a movement. Even if I mean.

I don't think that's what happened. But I also feel like it's really hard to tell nowadays and you can't rule it out.

Here's the thing. When you start looking at the other films, each one of them has some little problem with them that makes them somehow less palatable. We're talking about this issue of how negative campaigning or, you know, serious questions that undermine your narrative can hurt your film. And there are other films this year that have gone through that. Can you give me a sense of some of them?

'Yeah. I mean, this year it's been one little mini scandal after another. I mean, usually there's 1 or 2 per year. But, you know, this year, for instance, the Brutalist had a thing about how it used AI to just like tweak the Hungarian accents of the of the film stars. Anora, which is about a sex worker in Brooklyn, its star Mikey Madison said she declined to use an intimacy coordinator, which is fast becoming an industry protection. So that raised some eyebrows. You know, Wicked. I don't think this really people hardly remember this anymore, but you know, when it was being made, Ariana Grande hooked up and is still dating Ethan Slater, who plays Boq in the movie. And his ex-wife wrote an essay about what it's been like for her for The Cut.

'So each one of those examples. No, no. But each one of those examples undermines its narrative, right? If the Brutalist is about creativity in a self-made man, and then you bring in A.I. just to do the basics like his accent. Not great, right? Especially for an industry that is upset with A.I. in terms of its labor force. Yeah. If you have someone do a film about sex workers and turn down the intimate intimacy coordinators. Well, that's not great for all of these actresses who are going around saying, I actually kind of need this support on a film. And it's a fight every time you want to get one. Right. So that's another thing that might poison the well for a voter. And finally, with Wicked, it's a family film, right? Like just you're going around being a role model. And so it's very easy to, like, point to this tabloid fixture and this question and it literally undermine the sort of glitter pink tale that's being told. Like each time it's a thing that punctures the balloon of the story. Yeah.

I remember the one I forgot before, which was the star of I'm Still Here, the Brazilian movie Fernanda Torres, absolutely beloved actress who won the Golden Globe in a sort of surprise win. It came up that she did blackface in a comedy routine like years ago.

Who among us?

So she had to quickly apologize for that. So, yeah, it has just this year had this feeling of just like who doesn't have a skeletons in their closet at this point.

What are you going to be looking at in these final days?

Well, I don't think we're going to hear any more from Karla Sofia Gascon. I think she's been put in some kind of undisclosed location for the rest of Oscar season. I'm curious if she'll show up at the awards. You know, part of my book was about looking back in history and thinking, okay, what what was this really about? What was the subtext? How did this Oscar year sort of chime with what the whole country or what the industry was was grappling with in whatever year it was 1976 or 1999 or 1942. I think it's too soon to tell, like what this year is about, but it's definitely about a lot of drama and chaos. And as someone who writes about the Oscars, I always root for drama and chaos.

You're into it for the mess

It's something to talk about and write about.

I know, but I had this grand ender I was going to ask you, because here we are, we're like post Twitter, post union strikes, post streaming production, collapse, post fires in Hollywood. I mean, it's just been like a wild handful of years. And I was sort of hoping maybe maybe actually, that's why so many of these films are from abroad. But it felt like I was going to learn a little something about the state of American movies from this season. And you're saying the state is still hot mess?

Well, I would say you point out something very true, which is that it's very international this year. The academy has become more international in its membership. That was part of the post OscarsSoWhite diversification of the voting body. And so the Oscars are less about just Hollywood. Now. There are you know, we have a movie from Brazil. We have two French directors nominated for best director. And what's so interesting to me is that this year, it feels like the countries themselves are extremely invested. And it's like the Oscars this year reminds me of the World Cup because it's like, you know, Brazil and France are like in the semifinals and and just the emails in my inbox alone from Brazilian journalists. I can tell you Brazil is extremely engaged this year in a way they have never been. And I think part of what happened with Emilia Perez is a kind of culture clash.

I want to ask you one other thing, which is reading parts of your book, doing research for this, it actually made me question a lot of the films that in my mind were good. Right. I mean, some of them have fallen off straight up. Everyone admits American Beauty. Now people are like, What were we thinking? And it's like, well, now we know you were the you were the subject of a crazy, you know, Oscar campaign. And it made me really, like not trust any of that process.

Well, I'll tell you this. What I always say is if you're looking to the Oscars as a barometer of pure cinematic worth, you will always be disappointed or enraged because the first line of the book is the Oscars are always getting it wrong. It's true that going back to Citizen Kane not winning Best Picture in 1972. But, you know, on the other hand, the Oscars are a great way to get a window into how Hollywood views itself or wants to view itself. And every year there's a new cast of characters and a new bunch of interweaving storylines. And yes, campaigns. But campaigns don't always work. You know, think about the millions upon millions upon millions of dollars that Netflix has spent over years trying to win best picture. And they have not yet achieved it. And part of that is that there's a kind of resentment in Hollywood toward Netflix that, you know, they were the disruptors who undermined the theatrical industry that Hollywood has had for a century. So I think that you can only spend so much. I mean, we see that in politics, too. The candidate that spends the most money often does not win.

Well, Michael Schulman, thank you so much for talking about this with me. I really appreciate it.

I had a fun time. Happy Oscars.

That was Michael Schulman. New Yorker staff writer and author of Oscar Wars A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears. The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio, and this episode was produced by Jesse Remedios with assistance from Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez, the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig, and its technical director is Dan Dzula. We had support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lenie Steinhardt, Jamus Andres, Nicole Pesaru and Lisa Namarow. And as always, thank you for listening.