Epic 'Emilia Pérez' Spiral; 'The Wild Robot' Music Man Soars
Epic 'Emilia Pérez' Spiral; 'The Wild Robot' Music Man SoarsMy convo with Kris Bowers reminds us what's thrilling about the Oscars as the shocking controversy around Karla Sofia Gascón grows
“I didn’t have anything prepared, you guys,” Zoe Saldaña said as she accepted the best supporting actress award from the London Critics’ Circle on Sunday. That might sound hard to believe given her Golden Globe award win in early January and the near-universal conviction that she’s been Oscar’s supporting actress frontrunner ever since. But what she said next made it clear she realizes the ground has shifted radically beneath her in the past few days: “I wasn’t expecting this — especially now.” When I published last Thursday’s newsletter, it had been just a few hours since dozens of Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofia Gascón’s racist, Islamophobic old tweets had gone viral. Gascón had already issued a brief apology via Netflix, but the real fireworks were still to come. On Friday she sent a second, lengthier statement directly to The Hollywood Reporter, then on Sunday gave an hourlong tearful interview to CNN Español — both without the cooperation of Netflix, I’m told. Gascón has now had plenty of opportunity to apologize, but she has also only extended the reach of what was already an explosive story in the Oscar race. As the titular character of Emilia Pérez and the first openly trans actress ever nominated for an Oscar, she was the face of Netflix’s awards campaign, which had focused on the film’s themes of women standing up against oppressive systems — and on the character of Emilia, in particular, finding her moral compass. Though she was never widely predicted to win best actress, Gascón and her presence in the race were supposed to help bolster Emilia’s claim as the boundary-breaking, forward-thinking best picture contender. As the line from a 2023 best picture nominee goes, there goes that dream. With her efforts to quell the backlash, Gascón appears to have fully spun herself out of the Emilia Pérez campaign’s orbit, which should leave room for the rest of the team to steer clear of her blast radius. Then again, director Jacques Audiard came in for his own, quieter round of criticism for claiming that Spanish is “the language of the poor and the migrants,” so there’s truly no telling how many more twists are left in this saga. Anatomy of a Scandal: ‘It Makes Me Really Sad’
That brings us back, fairly or not, to Saldaña, who still feels like the film’s best chance for a win and has been working in Hollywood long enough to know how to navigate around a scandal. During a post-film Q&A in London last Friday, Saldaña chose her words carefully. “It makes me really sad because I don’t support [it], and I don’t have any tolerance for any negative rhetoric towards people of any group,” she said of the controversy around Gascón, before pivoting to an emphasis on the film’s broader message: “I’m happy that you’re all here and that you’re all still showing up for Emilia because the message that this film has is so powerful and the change that it can bring forward to communities that are marginalized day in and day out is important.” Everyone I’ve spoken to in the past few days has been asking the same question: How did this happen? How did the Netflix team not vet Gascón’s tweets? And if not Netflix, why didn’t her personal representatives at the Lede Company vet them? (Netflix had no comment when reached, and Gascón’s personal representatives have not responded to requests for comment.) The circular firing squads may not emerge until after the Oscars, once the extent of the damage is clear, but surely someone will wind up taking the blame here. The larger question for the moment is what happens to Emilia Pérez, whose team spent a week riding high as the Oscar nomination leader (with the most nods ever for a non-English language film) and has presumably been in crisis mode ever since. The best picture race remains diffuse, so even if you think Emilia can’t win now, nobody seems to agree on what could win instead. Along with Saldaña, the standout original song that she performs in the film, “El Mal,” remains competitive. Beyond that, it’s hard to imagine a lot of Academy voters sticking their necks out for Emilia Pérez in categories like adapted screenplay or director. I look forward to asking Academy members about this mess during our live Ankler events next week — RSVP to see me talk to the teams behind Conclave and Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, it will be a great time! We’ve got more than a week before final Oscar voting starts, and a lot of awards shows to get through next weekend — including Friday’s Critics Choice Awards, where Gascón is nominated for best actress. I want to say I doubt another scandal this crazy could emerge between now and then, but given how 2025 is going thus far, we should brace for just about anything. In the meantime, there are more Oscar contenders to talk to, and a lot of cinematic achievement to celebrate. Want to feel better about the future of music and the movies? Read my interview below with The Wild Robot’s Oscar-nominated composer Kris Bowers, a firm believer in Los Angeles, creative collaboration, and clearing the path for more young musicians to follow in his footsteps.
‘It Feels Like I’ve Achieved Something Really Profound’
Kris Bowers won his first Oscar just last year, as co-director of the documentary short film The Last Repair Shop. But receiving his first nomination as a composer, for his soaring and emotional work on The Wild Robot, is another thing entirely. “So many people in the music branch are people that I’ve literally studied for years and who I've looked up to for years,” Bowers tells me in a call from his Los Angeles home. “It feels like I’ve achieved something really profound and have made my childhood self proud because of how much my effort was aiming to be considered in the same breath as those people.” At the same time, it’s a bittersweet moment. When the Oscar nominations were announced, Bowers was evacuated from his Pasadena home, where he lives with his young daughter and wife, who is expecting their second child, a son, in March. Though many of the nomination reaction statements sent out by publicists mentioned the wildfires and the challenges that lie ahead for Los Angeles, Bowers’ was by far the most personal. “My family and my little basement studio where I wrote The Wild Robot is safe, thank goodness,” Bowers wrote. “This morning’s nomination and outpouring of love from the audience has been a source of great strength and reassurance during what has been a supremely challenging year here in L.A.”
A few days later, Bowers said that despite the great honor, “most of my conversations at our house are about whether or not we’re keeping our family safe with the air quality, and having conversations with toxicologists.” And he’s aware that despite the many promises from the entertainment industry about rebuilding the city in the wake of the fires, it remains an exceptionally challenging time to forge a Hollywood career. “We have a lot of close friends that just decided that this was the catalyst that they needed to decide to leave L.A.,” Bowers, a 35-year-old Los Angeles native, tells me. “This also feels like a time where a lot of people are also just doubling down on L.A. and really saying, this is where I have my roots. That makes me feel really positive. I think that will ripple into the film industry in terms of how many people are talking about the importance of filming here.” Bowers, who studied jazz and classical piano as a high school student, credits jazz in particular with his constant desire for collaboration, which carried over to his work on The Wild Robot. “It felt so important for the score to have a different approach to the sound of the wilderness,” he says. “I was really interested in this idea of extending the sound design into the score in a creative way.”  That led him not only to the Sandbox Percussion ensemble, which used a wide range of unconventional instruments to create the sound of the forest in The Wild Robot, but also the film’s sound team, which was also nominated for an Oscar (the DreamWorks/Universal film is a contender for best animated feature as well). Animated films are rarely nominated in sound categories, which Bowers says “is just so wild to me — they’re literally building everything from the ground up!” He describes a “very, very involved collaboration” with the sound team and director Chris Sanders toward the end of the process of making The Wild Robot, which sometimes involved identifying places where Bowers’s score wasn’t needed at all. In one emotional sequence near the end when the heroic robot Roz is in danger, he says, “the score was actually letting us off the hook emotionally — we feel like she’s going to be okay because the music’s telling us that this is an emotional moment.” Instead the sound design team’s quiet explosions and humming machinery take center stage. In the moments when Bowers’s score does take the focus, though, you cannot miss it, particularly in what might be the film’s best sequence, accompanied by the score track titled “I Could Use a Boost.” It’s so intensely emotional that it has inspired TikToks marveling at how much the movie can get you to care about a gosling and his robot mother.  Sanders built the sequence around Bowers’ music, even though it’s more often the other way around. “He wanted that moment to feel so natural in terms of its progression and growth and shape that he wanted the music to be able to evolve as a piece of music, and then for them to figure out how to animate around that,” says Bowers. He reflected on his own experience as a father to unlock the right tone for the scene, which hits such an emotional high note that Sanders had to warn early test audiences that it wasn’t actually the end of the film. “Thinking about my experience with my daughter, thinking about my wife and the sacrifices she’s made — it’s like, how can I not go that hard?”
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