She’ll be Best Actress-nominated, of course, but in the blink of an eyelash our tectonic plates have shifted and…wait, what’s happening?…identity campaigns are no longer a compelling poker hand.

Or so says an 11.2 N.Y. Times article by Jeremy W. Peters and “Identity Trap” author Yascha Mounk in particular.

If you ask me Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone losing the Best Actress Oscar vote earlier this year to Poor Things’ Emma Stone was an early indication of this cultural-turning-the-road thang.

Eat shit, wokesters!

Earlier today I felt honestly unclear about Karla Sofia Gascon’s situation. I asked around but no one gave me any answers of any kind. So I searched around on my own.

In Emilia Perez, Karla’s titular character submits to full-on surgical transitioning including, one gathers, the removal of male genitalia. I realize that a specific question to Karla Sofia’s reps along these lines is considered gauche or insensitive in certain circles, but here goes anyway: has Karla Sofia Gascon submitted to the same Emilia Perez-type procedure? Or is she walking around with a package?

I know questions of this type sound disrespectful to wokesters, but Gascon’s Best Acress Oscar campaign is far more identity-driven than performance-based, so why can’t we just lay it out on the kitchen table?

Karla Sofia began life as a man, and has worked as an actor/actress for quite a while. Her dead name is Juan Carlos Gascon, which she went by until 2018.

I honestly think that Juan Carlos Gascon, with his once-slender face, blonde-ish hair and bro whiskers, looks more fetching in his original biological state than Karla Sofia Gascon does as a woman now. Karla’s face is rounder. She seems larger somehow.

Karla was born 52 years ago in Alcobendas, Spain, but since 2009 has been a resident of what I’m presuming is Mexico City. A shamelessly softball profile of Gascon by Deadline‘s Antonia Blyth, posted this morning, only says that she lives “in Mexico.” If Blyth were to run an interview with Angelina Jolie, would she report that Jolie lives in the United States?

It would appear that Karla Sofia is, after a fashion, “straight.” Gascón is married to Marisa Gutierrez. They met at a nightclub in Alcobendas when Juan Carlos was 19, or in 1991. Together they have a daughter, who was born in 2011. It’s not my place to speculate about Karla Sofia and Marisa’s marriage, but if they were to split up Karla would presumably still be into women as a rule. Her trans sexual behavior is apparently the same as Lana Wachowski‘s…she enjoys being a lesbian.

If I’m wrong about any of this, please inform.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @armiehammer

The reason she hasn’t yet agreed is almost certainly because her people don’t trust her unscripted abilities…they’re afraid that she’ll somehow misspeak or put her foot in her mouth.

I think Kamala needs to step out of the scripted arena and let her hair down. She could finally address how woke insanity took over the progessive left in 2020. She could candidly state that the Biden administration, reacting to the cruelty of Trump’s resrictive border policy, arguably leaned a bit too far in the other direction for three years. Why hasn’t she said the obvious about the vice-presidency, which is that it’s essentially a ceremonial, rubber-stamp job that has no independent agency? (Ask Lyndon Johnson and John Nance Garner.) Chris Christie said the same thing yesterday on The View.

As we all know, Kamala flubbed it when Anderson Cooper asked if the Biden administration had made any mistakes and, if so, whether those mistakes taught her anything.

What she should have said: “As you know, Anderson, that’s a ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ question. If I admit to mistakes I’ll be trashed for throwing President Biden under the bus, and if I say there were no mistakes I’ll be called a delusional liar and a fantasist.

“It’s part of human nature to make occasional mistakes, and hopefully to learn from them, and c’mon…there’s never been a White House administration that didn’t screw up here and there. I could acknowledge rhetorically or admit that some believe Joe’s team tactically screwed up on the Afghnistan withdrawal. I could acknowledge rhetorically that some maintain we were too liberal in our border policy for two or three years. But I’m not going to say that because it’s a no-win. To be human is to be fallible. I believe in learning, growing and improving our game. I’ll leave it here.”

Trump: Can you imagine Kamala doing this show?

Rogan: I could imagine her doing this show.

Trump: She'd be laying on the floor.

Rogan: She was supposed to do it. And she might still do it. I hope she does.

Trump: She's not gonna do it.

Rogan: I will talk to her like a… pic.twitter.com/KNv2bjDPmz

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) October 26, 2024

Is Kamala Harris charismatic and razzle-dazzly enough to serve as the nation’s 47th president? She doesn’t need to be. What matters is that she’s a decent, ethically grounded, steady-as-she-goes and obviously intelligent politician.

Harris can memorize and repeat the necessary talking points and can project sincerity and conviction as far as it goes, but she isn’t much for thinking on her feet and verbally tap-dancing like some wowser wordsmith…she’s no Bill Clinton, no improvisational dynamo…generating occasional breakthrough moments and special political poetry seems to elude her for the most part.

Harris was pretty good during tonight’s CNN Town Hall but she’ll never be gifted at this stuff. We all understand this, I think. But you know what else?

Within the personality and basic approach of a hard-working, carefully constructed operator, she comes off as a serious, sensible, focused, practical–minded and fundamentally moral person who isn’t into fooling around or playing games or lowering the colloquial so the rubes can have a little fun…she is who she is, and Lord knows she’s a much better human being than Donald Trump, who is clearly dangerous and insane.

I’m going to repeat this: Harris is a much better person than Trump — more sensible, more mature, a believer in regulated thought. The woke thing burns within her and that’s unfortunate, but at heart she sees life in steady, practical terms. She’s no Gavin Newsom-level orator, but she won’t generate storms of madness and chaos.

“It doesn’t cost $60,000 to bury a fucking Mexican…don’t pay it!”

In elite polls posted by The Gatecrashers (just went up!) and GoldDerby.com, Sean Baker‘s Anora is decisively the most favored Best Picture nominee, if not (go for it!) the most likely winner of the 2025 Best Picture Oscar.

Out of 12 Gate Crashers contributors, Anora has five #1 votes, Conclave has 2 votes in this exalted category, and Dune II and Emilia Perez have one each.

Out of 28 Gold Derby contributors Anora has tallied ten first-place rankings — the highest percentage of all the Best Picture contenders.

The second–place Emilia Perez, favored by trans identity celebrationists, is supported by seven GD contributors. Conclave has four #1 rankings, and The Brutalist (which Oscar-wise you can totally forget about right now) has three.

Anora director Sean Baker is the top contender in the helmer category.

Anora‘s Mikey Madison is the top vote-getter in the Best Actress, maintaining a decisive lead over Emilia Perez‘s Karla Sofia Gascón. Madison has the Best Actress Oscar in the bag. Don’t even think about it. In the woke ballyhoo tradition of Lily Gladstone, Gascon’s campaign is one-third about artistic merit, two-thirds about identity.

Right now Conclave‘s Ralph Fiennes is the leading Best Actor contender on both charts.

Also on both charts, A Real Pain‘s Kieran Culkin is the dominant contender for Best Supporting Actor realm.

Another noteworthy blast (certainly as far as The Gatecrashers is concerned) is the absolute Best Supporting Actress dominance of Zoe Saldana in Emilia Perez. Saldana is slightly ahead of The Piano Lesson‘s Danielle Deadwyler on the GD chart.

Here’s a bare-bones intro penned by Sasha Stone on the Gatecrashers front page:

Yesterday Barack Obama chided young black males for saying they might vote for Trump. The reason black Zoomer dudes feel alienated from Harris-Walz is partly due to garden-variety misogyny, and partly because they feel dissed and dismissed by wokesters and well-educated progressive women in particular. They’ve heard over and over that “men are the problem” and so they’re basically saying “fuck it.” As are many young white men. They don’t like or respect us, they’re saying, so we’re standing with The Beast.

In the matter of Scott Feinberg’s latest THR Oscar spitball forecast…

HE to Feinberg: I’m not putting down Tim Fehlbaum‘s September 5 — it’s a very decently constructed historical procedural about ABC’s Munich coverage of the 1972 Olympic Games / Black September tragedy — but I’m not understanding why it’s sitting at the top of your current Best Picture Oscar forecast. It’s good but not that good. John Magaro has more screen time than Peter Sarsgaard, but he doesn’t have much X-factor charisma — a sturdy actor but a tiny bit dull.

You’ve got Emilia Perez in your #2 slot, and I get it. Putting it farther down your list might trigger the fanatics and possibly start a whisper campaign that you (and by extension The Hollywood Reporter) might be transphobic on some deep-down level. So you’re playing it safe, and I totally understand and sympathize with this strategy.

That said, the most significant driver of the Emilia Perez bandwagon is woke identity stuff — you know it, I know it, the HE commentariat knows it. It’s a good, verve-y film in many respects, but while the beginning section is pretty great the ending disappoints. Sooner or later the tent will begin to deflate.

Right now there are four deserving heavy hitters — Conclave, Anora, All We Imagine as Light (get behind this snubbed masterpiece, Academy members!), and A Real Pain. Emilia Perez brings the total to five. I still haven’t seen The Brutalist but I’ll probably include it as a sixth-place contender after I finally catch it on Friday, 10.11.

Bad on Scott for relegating The Apprentice, Ali Abassi’s excellent Trump-Cohn period drama with a truly brilliant supporting performance from Jeremy Strong, to 23rd place…really bad! By any fair standard this movie delivers carefully cured, blue-chip goods.

Feinberg ranking The Substance and The Piano Lesson in 25th and 26th place = adios muchachos!

Here’s hoping that James Mangold and Jay Cocks‘ A Complete Unknown joins this modest fraternity, and maybe Babygirl also for a total of eight noms. Okay, maybe September 5 will slip in and occupy the ninth slot.

Forget Sing Sing, Saturday Night, Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot, Walter Salles‘ I’m Still Here, The Room Next Door, The Seed of the Sacred Fig (good but not good enough) and Civil War (I was a huge fan but too many people didn’t like it).

YET TO BE WIDELY SEEN:

In the comment thread that followed yesterday’s piece about Netflix’s official launch of Karla Sofia Gascón’s Best Actress campaign for Emilia Perez, HE reader “NPalma759”, seemingly irked, posted a question:

HE reply: A Best Supporting Actress Oscar is less of a big deal…it’s a little more elastic or experimental or in some cases a “here I am” greeting-card thing. Miyoshi Umeki for Sayonara…Donna Reed for From Here to Eternity…that line of country.

A Best Actress Oscar is or can be monumental, at least in voters’ heads. When a name-brand actress wins one, it can be fairly stated and without hyperbole “now she belongs to the ages.”

Young Jennifer Lawrence entered that hallowed realm when she deservedly won a Best Actress Oscar for her passionate eccentric nutter in Silver Linings Playbook, performed when she was only 21. But Lawrence scored like a champ, and in the same guns-blazing way that young Mikey Madison (25) managed for her lead role in Anora. Madison is fated to win the Best Actress Oscar early next year or I’m a monkey’s uncle.

A Best Supporting Actress Oscar is fine and fully noteworthy, but it’s “not quite Ivy League” in the Richard Masur sense of that term — it’s something else — call it a career launcher (Mercedes McCambridge in All The King’s Men), a respectable milestone, a you-go-girl salute…it can be a tribute to a wowser blast-off performance by a respected veteran (Beatrice Straight in Network) or a passing fancy applause for a newcomer…an eye-opener, a cluck-cluck, an approval-meter surge.

In this sense I would’ve been fine with (or would have at least understood) Lily Gladstone’s Molly Burkhart performance taking the 2023 Best Supporting Actress Oscar. I would have felt badly for the most deserving winner, The Holdovers’ Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who in fact won) but I would’ve gone along with it.

You can’t just elbow your way into the Best Actress realm as a strategic woke poker player…you have to show a tiny bit of reverence for the heart and soul histories…if you believe in Movie Catholicism and if you’re part of that dwindling fraternity that believes (or once believed) that movie theatres are churches, you really shouldn’t use a Best Actress Oscar campaign as a means to promote or validate or celebrate a formerly marginalized identity. It lowers the property values when you do that. It’s called “gaming the system.”

If Kamala Harris wants to expand her lead (and why wouldn’t she?), she needs to do three things right away.

One, make clear through surrogates what too few people seem to understand, which is that she had/has no real agency as vice-president under Joe Biden — vps are ceremonial stooges who parrot what the president wants or says — the term is “strictly backup” as no vice-president except Dick Cheney has ever significantly influenced any president’s policy or decisions.

Two, admit that the Biden administration made a few mistakes (i.e., Afghanistan withdrawal, overly liberal immigration policy, too accommodating to crazy wokesters on gender stuff and pregnant men) but that she’s learned from these errors and here’s how she feels now.

Three, in line with admitting these mistakes she needs to do what vice-president Hubert Humphrey did during his 1968 presidential campaign, and that’s break with the president on this or that matter of policy. Announce that when she becomes president she’ll be going her own way and calling her own shots. Humphrey didn’t rise in the polls until he broke with LBJ over the Vietnam War. If he’d announced his differences with LBJ earlier in the campaign HHH might have prevailed over Richard Nixon.

…and in so doing has probably alienated the Netflix marketing honchos who are seemingly invested in selling the idea that the 52-year-old Gascon is a major Best Actress contender.

Not only do Lisa Taback and Kyle Buchanan apparently disagree with Poland, but the entire community of whoo-whoo trans celebrationists are almost certainly enraged by this admission, and are possibly up in arms.

HE truly respects Poland for defiantly posting the truth about Gascon and the film’s real lead, played by Zoe Saldana.

In THB #595: Emilia Perez, Poland declares that Saldana’s Rita Moro Castro, a Mexico City attorney (Poland calls her a “functionary”) whom Gascon hires to help facilitate his/her gender transition and organize his/her disappearance, “happens to be the lead of the film…the only absolute truth-teller…the only one who knows pretty much everything.”

The bottom line is that any award-season columnist who disputes the validity of Gascon’s Best Actress campaign has more or less slit his or her throat as far as a Netflix Emilia Perez ad buy is concerned.

I said the same thing in a 6.19 post, to wit:

Netflix marketers can still change their minds by pushing Gascon for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, which she would obviously and absolutely win hands down, just as Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone would have easily won if she had decided to campaign in supporting rather than lead.

I’m presuming that running a Gladstone-styled identity campaign by way of a reality-denying Best Actress assertion is what Gascon and Netflix have in mind.

Winning isn’t the point — the idea is to game the system in order to validate and celebrate the identity of the contender (i.e., the first trans actress to mount a game-changing bid for a Best Actress Oscar).

…you’re in a very tough spot financially. We all understand this; even HE’s toxic commenters understand what extreme financial pressure feels like.

But Hammer suffering is a good thing…right, Elizabeth Wagmeister? Tie him to the Allman Brothers whipping post…lash, bash, attach the electrodes, turn on the current, etc.

Hope you're all happy with what you did to this man. I don't expect any sympathy from you or forgiveness. You like it this way, even if it's destroyed Hollywood. https://t.co/EO1cjaR37l

— Sasha Stone at Awards Daily (@AwardsDaily) August 28, 2024

I’ve posted the following twice, so here goes the third time…

Posted on 2.4.23 — 17 months ago:

For the first time since he was branded as a sexual cannibal-animal and wham-banished from the film business, Armie Hammer has presented his side of the story.

Ignore the Variety summary by Elizabeth Wagmeister because the Air Mail piece is about a lot more than just about the usual contrition and spin (i.e., “I was bad, and now forgive me”). What Hammer contends and what he offers in terms of compelling evidence is highly persuasive.

I’m not going to summarize the main points of James Kirchick’s 2.4 Air Mail article as anyone can read it (it’s not paywalled), but there’s no question that anyone with an open mind will emerge with their previous impressions strongly challenged.