‘Emilia Pérez’ Post Gascón Controversy: Zoe Saldaña Tells Critics Choice Crowd To Be “Curious And Openhearted”; Songwriter Calls Awards Season “Hectic”

deadline.com:

The fallout from Emilia Perez‘s Karla Sofía Gascón’s racist and Islamophobic social media was never expected to have any impact on the pic’s traction at the 30th annual Critics Choice Awards given that the Jan.

10 ballot deadlines occurred prior to the Jan. 30. scandal. That said, the CCA winners of the Netflix pic duly ensured they didn’t draw any more negative attention to the film post Gascón.

In fact, the first openly trans Oscar nominee’s name wasn’t even brought up. Instead in all three of the recipients’ acceptance speeches –Zoe Saldaña for Best Supporting Actress, songwriters Camille and Clement Ducol for Original Song “El Mal” and Jacques Audiard for Best International Film — the group stuck to the positive takeaways of the LGBTQ+ noir feature musical.

Rather than send her acceptance speech to the teleprompter, Saldaña opted to read it from a folded piece of paper in her pocket, underscoring at the end of it, “My wish for the impact of this film on audiences and our world is that I hope we can all be curious and openhearted towards each other because you never know when you’ll have the opportunity to be a hero in someone else’s story; our world is too big and too beautiful to be any other way.