Oscars 2025: Conan O’Brien pokes fun at ‘Emilia Pérez’ controversy
It’s tradition for the Oscars to kick off with the host running through the nominated movies and poking fun at them, and the controversy surrounding Emilia Pérez and the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón, weren’t immune from Conan O’Brien.
After being nominated for a record-breaking amount of Academy Awards for a foreign-language movie, the Netflix musical drama quickly fell out of favour after a series of offensive social media posts made by Gascón resurfaced and quickly pushed the film’s merits out of the spotlight in favour of controversy and backlash.
The actor tried to defend herself in an unauthorised interview, but it only served to overshadow everything else about Emilia Pérez. For a while, it looked as though Gascón wasn’t going to attend the Oscars at all, and after being on the receiving end of O’Brien’s jibe, maybe she wished she didn’t.
Reflecting on Sean Baker’s Anora, O’Brien revealed that the drama “uses the F-word 479 times,” which was “three times more than the record set by Karla Sofía Gascón’s publicist.” An easy shot to take, sure, but one that any self-respecting comedian couldn’t avoid.
Carrying on, O’Brien insisted that were Gascón to vent her frustrations with being made fun of in front of millions of viewers worldwide for the social media firestorm that severely dented Emilia Pérez’s chances of Oscars success, he was happy to share his name: Jimmy Kimmel.
In Far Out’s review of the movie, Emily Ruuskanen wrote: “Emilia Pérez is a film so eager to be a million things that it cannot commit to one thing, leaving you unsure whether you should be laughing with it or at it, swinging so far that the hits and misses feel even more disappointing, ultimately feeling confused and over-saturated. It presents itself as a story that explores queer identity and female empowerment but ultimately feels hollow and flat, creating a tonal disconnect in its imitation of a melodrama, but without any substance to pack any punch.”
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