Why Hollywood Turned on the Trans Mexican Cartel Movie | Episode 9

The point here that I am trying to make about all these PR strategies, about all the strategies, is that something happened with Amelia Perez. Something that many believe is a bit suspicious and possibly conspiratorial.
Guys, there has been a scandal unfolding in Hollywood that I've wanted to talk about for the last couple of months, but I'm kind of glad that I waited until just now because this involves Hollywood's awards season. This involves the Oscars, which are happening on Sunday night.
You guys will be watching this on Thursday, so I have let all of this play out. I have waited until this moment so I can hopefully bring you as up-to-date information as humanly possible, but we need to talk about the film to rule them all of 2025.
The film that has literally shaken up the entire Hollywood filmmaking landscape. And no, I am not talking about It Ends With Us.
That is shaking up the Me Too and legal landscape and the celebrity landscape. But this, this other film is shaking up something completely different.
Before we dive into this story though, if you want ad-free content, a weekly advice video, we just posted our first one called Dear Brett. If you want all of that and more, plus an exclusive newsletter, please check out my subscriber platform called Cooper Confidential.
We will link it below in the description. All right, so the movie in question, you guys might already know this.
The movie in question is Amelia Perez. This is the queer trans Mexican musical that has taken Hollywood by storm in 2024, 2025.
My crew off camera is literally shaking their heads in disbelief. You heard that correctly.
A queer trans Mexican cartel musical. It is like they were playing charades or what's that game where you like pull out random things and you have to like, it's like an improv game.
When I used to do improv, I used to do things with Second City in LA and you would have to pull random, you know, characters or scenes and landscapes and situations. You had to make something work.
You had to like make a scene out of nonsense. I feel like that is what Amelia Perez is.
But of course there is a real story here. And so Amelia Perez is about a Mexican drug cartel leader who fakes his own death to undergo

gender-affirming surgery. And then she, now she, re-emerges onto the scene and tries to live this

new life and is like re-welcomed by society and her family and her community as a woman. And yes,

all of this is happening through song because it is a musical. Here is a clip just to give you a taste.
Hello, very nice to meet you. I'd like to know about sex change operation.
I see, I see, I see. I see, I see, I see.
Men to woman. A woman to men.
Man to woman. From penis to vagina.
He's asking the question of, is it man to woman, woman to man, penis to vagina? That is a real thing. This was in a movie, a serious movie, guys, that has shaken up the Hollywood landscape, and not because it is so bad.
No, no, no, no, no, it is quite the contrary. It is because everybody loves it so much because this is just a brave, beautiful trans musical, and therefore it is the most nominated film of the entire year.
Penis to Vagina, the most nominated film. And to become the most nominated film of the year at the Oscars, they had to rack up 13 nominations.
13. If they had just gotten one more measly nomination, they would be in the category of the most nominated Oscar films, of which there are three, which is La La Land, Titanic, and All About Eve.
All three of them have 14 nominations. Nobody has ever cracked 15.
Amelia Perez, you should have done it. Beautiful Trans, Penis to Vagina Musical, you could have beat them all.
But no, they came close, a close second with 13 Oscar nominations. It also received 65 nominations across the board with all the other awards, like the SAG Awards, the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes.
And guys, why do you think that is? Is this such a mystery? Like, why did this queer, trans, Mexican cartel musical become the most nominated film, and actually the most nominated non-English film in Oscar history? Why did that happen? Well, because it's about a trans woman of color and it's a musical. I mean, this film is basically infallible until, my friends, until it was not.
Until it all blew up and imploded because of its creator, sending shockwaves throughout Hollywood and forging an identity politics reckoning, which is why we have to talk about. But we also have to ask, was this destruction organic or was it part of a PR smear campaign from competing films? I want to kind of break that down for you because this was something that I had no idea about.
I was actually talking to my PR guy on the phone. I was like, oh my God, I want to talk about Emilia Perez.
This is so crazy. And he was like, Brett, you realize that might've come from a competing Oscar lobbying PR firm.
I was like, hold, hold on, hold on. There are PR firms that are specifically designed to campaign for films to win the Oscars.
Yes, that is a whole thing. So obviously I think we need to break that down first.
So you might think that films just get nominated. We all tune into the Oscars.
We all, nobody's tuning into the Oscars anymore. Maybe this year to see if Amelia Perez wins.
And you know, people vote, the Academy votes and the the best film wins. But it really is not that simple.
What I learned is that there is an entire industry within Hollywood and then within PR that is built around award season for these huge nominated films every single year. Now, to help me break this down and offer some more insight for all of us, I called up my friend Daniel Daddario, who is Variety's chief entertainment correspondent.
And he even has a new novel coming out this year called The Talent that actually follows a group of actresses through this campaign for award season. And this is what he had to say about this lobbying.
It's not like a political campaign in the sense that it's not so direct of like vote for me, but it's not not like a political campaign. It's not a cheap endeavor and a lot of time and money is spent putting thought into getting these people where they need to go and saying the right thing.
So for Emilia Perez, for instance, the stars might have spent a lot of time talking about a message of inclusion and trans equality because those were themes of the movie and themes that also felt really, if you're someone who's voting on the Oscars those might be really resonant themes to you so it's emphasizing certain things. However guys this kind of campaigning was not always the case it used to be that the films would come out the voting body would vote on them everybody would show up yay the best film won they would go home but something changed in thes.
Some person burst out on the scene and completely disrupted how award shows went. And that person was none other than Harvey Weinstein, as Daniel breaks down.
It used to just be, you know, you'd get press coverage. You'd hope that the New York Times wrote about your movie and there'd be a premiere.
But there wasn't this gauntlet of promote, promote, promote. Among the things Harvey invented is oftentimes if there was a movie that had any kind of political theme, he would have the stars testify before Congress about just whatever the movie was about.
His influence, more than anything, is just having the stars of movies be totally omnipresent for months as opposed to just we made the movie vote on the movie if you like it or not there's an element of oscar campaigning especially the kind harvey did that's like propaganda where it's like we are going to feed you images and phrases over and over and hammer those images and phrases and when you have that ballot in front of you and you're voting, it's just, it's stuck in your mind. But the thing is, it's not just positive press that Harvey Weinstein was pushing.
It wasn't just making sure that these stars, these actors and actresses were in front of the voting bodies 24-7. You know, the for your consideration, that's what he started.
There is another strategy that Harvey created, the offense. The PR smear campaigns literally designed to take down other films in order to bolster their own.
A famous example is 1998, if you were around. The front runner was this movie, Saving Private Ryan, and Harvey Weinstein's movie was Shakespeare in Love.
Not only did he campaign for Shakespeare in Love about how good it was, he also is reported to have had people around town whispering in people's ears, Saving Private Ryan peaks in the first 20 minutes, and it's boring after that. The year that A Beautiful Mind came out, which is a movie that won Best Picture, somehow it emerged that the subject of the film, who in the movie is a hero, in real life I believe had said anti-Semitic things.
And this just kind of emerged and no one knew how this information had been found or who gave it to a journalist. But there were certainly rival films that stood to benefit if A Beautiful Mind fell.
Now, as Daniel said, all of this really started in the 90s with Harvey, but it has not stopped in the slightest. This has only grown since Harvey.
One article from 2023 said, inside the blood sport of Oscar campaigns, war rooms, oppo dumps, eight figure budgets, how the quest for award season glory got so cutthroat. And in this, they write, Oscar campaigns are often run by professional strategists, essentially a specialized breed of publicists.
One thing that always shocks me is how many jobs there are in the world. Like, it is genuinely crazy that there is a type of PR within PR under Hollywood, specifically about award season.
I mean, seriously, there, if you're trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, there is something for everyone. So go find what you're interested.
If you are interested in campaigning for films, there is something for you. They go on and they say, their job begins as early as a year before the award, sometimes before a film is even shot.
They advise on which festival a film should premiere at, shape a campaign platform, and hope that the film gains enough momentum to propel it into awards season. Sometimes several strategists work on a single film, and the war room of an Oscars campaign can grow to be as many as 10 or 20 people.
I mean they are pulling out all the stops. They are not relying on hope and a prayer even though prayer is good especially when you're praying with Hallow.
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Now this article goes on and they later touch the negative narratives. Again, these are the things that Harvey pioneered.
Negative narratives are usually attributed to the diabolical workings of rival strategists. The stories about abusive directors, overblown budgets, whether the real people behind biopics should really be celebrated.
Quote, they try to change someone else's narrative by adding dirt to the lair, citing the old rumor that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck didn't really write Good Will Hunting. More recent example that strategists still talk about is when Green Book was up for best picture in 2019.
The week the nomination ballots went out, a story resurfaced about the director of the movie, Peter Farley, and a joke he used to play 20 years earlier that involved exposing himself. Farley apologized the same day.
The film still won, but many believe another best picture campaign planted the story. So this just changes my entire perspective about a word show, about Hollywood, and the fact that maybe a lot of the things that come out about these actors, about these directors, that it isn't really genuine or organic.
And maybe it's actually planted by these insane PR teams and these media strategists whose entire job is to make sure that their film wins against all odds. Now what's also really interesting is that these smear campaigns are often not visible to the naked eye.
I mean, think about that last line. Publicists might leak things like that.
They might sneakily send tips about people in these other films to reporters. They might even write entire negative articles about something or someone to make it seem like this smear and this negative press is organic and grassroots, which is a term called astroturfing in PR.
Now to call in another relevant story to make this kind of sing for you guys, this astroturfing is exactly what Blake Lively is accusing Justin Baldoni of. Now, I highly doubt that, as you guys definitely know.
I actually think that her fall from grace was completely organic after years and years of people not calling her out on her bad behavior and people covering up her bad behavior. But of course, only time will tell.
That will happen in the courts. But here's a headline about that.
Blake Lively's, it ends with us allegations, astroturfing and when fans feel manipulated by PR. The point here that I am trying to make about all of these PR strategies, about all the strategies, is that something happened with Amelia Perez, this queer Mexican trans movie musical, something that many believe is a bit suspicious and possibly conspiratorial.
Because this film, that again, was perfectly infallible in the eyes of Hollywood, perfectly positioned for a win at the Oscars, dominating the awards season, was suddenly blown up after a freelance journalist exposed the lead actor, Carla Sofia Gascon, for racist and bigoted tweets. And as we all know by now, after so many years of this, that is how the fall from grace really starts.
Now, everything with Amelia Perez is going swimmingly until this moment, until a freelance journalist named Sarah Hagey uncovered. And again, I'm doing this in air quotes because we don't know whether this was organic or whether this was planted by somebody, but she did uncover and she posted a series of old tweets from Gascon and put them on X.
Now, Sarah Hoggy posted and said, it is so insane that Carla Sofia Gascon still has these tweets up. Straight up have never seen tweets this racist from somebody actively campaigning to win an Academy Award.
There are more than it doesn't. Now, one thing that really stood out to me about this post from Sarah was that she's not really just saying it's appalling that these tweets were ever posted in the first place.
She's saying it's appalling that they are still up while she is campaigning for the Academy Awards, which feels like a totally different conversation. But what she is focusing on is the PR strategy saying, hey, this is the smoking gun.
And Sarah was gonna be the one to expose her. And guys, these tweets, listen, I am not too sensitive.
I, you know, can be politically incorrect, but I will say these tweets are a doozy. And it turns out that the biggest advocate for protecting Europe and the West from the immigration crisis coming from the Middle East is actually the lead of this queer trans Mexican movie musical, Carla Sofia Gascon.
And fair warning, no punches were pulled, and these tweets that I am showing you are actually the most mild of all the ones that she posted. In one, Carla says, New attack in France, beheadings in Nice by one of these retarded followers of Allah.
How many times will we have to expel these madmen from Europe until we realize that their religion is incompatible with Western values. We do not learn." Another one about the same issue reads, "'Sorry, is it just my impression or are there more and more Muslims in Spain? Every time I go pick up my daughter from school, there are more and more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their heels.
Maybe next year, instead of English, we'll have to teach Arabic and a lamb." Another one, how many more times will history have to expel the Moors from Spain? We have not yet realized what this threat of civilization means, which constantly attacks the freedom and coherence of the individual. It is not about racism, it is about Islam.
And guys, there are about a dozen more of these tweets just about the Islamic expansion in Europe, which, to be fair, is a big issue and a concern for millions. I feel like I see tweets about this all the time on X.
And obviously, Gascon feels this personally and passionately considering all of these tweets. And again, the posts that I chose to read you were the mild ones, so you can go read the other ones yourself.
Now, in addition to that conversation, she also joined in on American Discourse after the death of George Floyd. And Gascon posted, let me get this straight.
A guy tries to pass off a counterfeit bill after consuming methamphetamine. An idiot policeman arrives and goes too far in arresting him, killing him and ruining the lives of his family and his colleagues, and turning the guy with the bill into a martyr hero.
And then in another post following that one, Variety translated this one, Gascon says, I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys without rights and consider policemen to be assassins. They are all wrong.
Too many things to reflect on regarding the behavior of our species every time an event occurs. Perhaps it is no longer a question of racism, but of social classes that feel threatened by each other.
Maybe that's the only real difference. Needless to say, all of these tweets blew up big time.
It was a huge, huge ordeal, especially because of social media. This was not, you know, 2005, where only a few people saw it.
This did not make shockwaves. No, this was literally everywhere, which is another huge thing that has changed in this award show campaigning, which Daniel also touched on.
Social media has, it's the same thing it's done to politics and the same thing that it's done to the economy and the same thing, it's also done to the awards. It's just everything is scaled up and more extreme now.
It used to just be, you went to the movies and saw, I don't know, Rain Man and you watch the Oscars and like, oh, that won. Now people are, people have faves and that they're rooting on through social media and every misstep or incremental win or they won a Golden Globe or they lost a SAG award is now chalked up by all these fans online who are like obsessed because it's kind of like their sports.
And as Daniel touched on, this lobbying and the campaigning for award shows is no longer just for Hollywood and just for the Academy, the voting body of the Oscars. It is for everyone.
And so when someone fails or makes a misstep of insane proportions in their eyes, we all know. We all see it.
We are all engaged. Sometimes it is social media users themselves who expose it.
Everybody is involved. It's not just about Hollywood.
And so obviously this took place, it spiraled out of control, and neither Netflix nor Carla's team could control it. Now, to be fair, Carla's PR person is the same person that represented Will Smith after the slap incident, which I think was just a terrible hire in the first place.
We saw that turned out for him. So I think you can kind of guess how things are going for poor Carla Sofia Gascon right now.
But that is besides the point, I want to get back to the impact that this had on Amelia Perez because as Daniel said, the one thing, the one possible thing that could destroy this perfect woke inclusive film did. I think what happened with Amelia Perez is kind of a perfect storm and here's why.
It was the front runner to win many Oscars, including Best Picture, in part because of its message of inclusivity. That message of inclusivity also made it hard to criticize because it would look insensitive to come after this movie that is coming from the right place.
Basically, the only thing that could have sunk it is when the call is coming from inside the house. And Carlos Sofia Gascon's tweets so fly in the face of the message of inclusivity and acceptance, it really hurt the campaign in a way that all the other movies and the people behind them must have been very gratified by because now they have a shot.
And this is why this story is so interesting because it is literally forcing Hollywood to reconcile how they have put identity politics and inclusion politics on a pedestal. And now they have to decide how far they are willing to go to protect this.
Like, what side are they choosing? Are they willing to defend a trans woman of color in her time of need when she is being canceled, or are they going to pick the side of the people that feel offended by her bigoted racist tweets? Well, apparently not. Apparently they are not choosing the side of the trans woman of color who is being canceled.
Apparently hating Islam and criticizing Floyd was the step too far, and the entire narrative around the film flipped. It went from trans joy and inclusion, and this being the most progressive, amazing, groundbreaking film of all time and the first trans actress nominated for the best leading actress at the Oscars to utter chaos, panic, and regret.
In fact, Selena Gomez, who is one of the other stars of Amelia Perez, put it well when she said that, quote, some of the magic has disappeared from Amelia Perez amidst this scandal. And so I guess really what I'm trying to say is that they decided that queer and trans joy just wasn't the end-all be-all after all.
From here, Carla Sofia Gascon was iced out. Carla is still nominated for best actress, that is still a revolutionary, you know, first time that has happened, first trans person to be nominated, but it is unlikely at this point that Gascon will actually attend the Oscars that are happening on Sunday night.
Netflix, who produced and distributed the film, has even said that they have halted all communication with Gascon. They will no longer be paying for travel or lodging or inclusion at any of these events.
The production team, Netflix, the Oscars campaign has removed Gascon from all four-year consideration materials, which guys, if you live in Los Angeles or if you're involved in the film industry at all, during this time of year, everything that you see in LA are huge posters of all of these films. And Emilia Perez with 13 nominations, I am sure, was everywhere featuring in huge fashion, Carlaia Gascon.
Well, Gascon has now been removed from all of that, which I'm sure was very expensive. And the cast has, of course, distanced themselves as well, like you saw with Selena.
Zoe Saldana, who was another star of the film, said, quote, I do not support any negative rhetoric of racism or bigotry towards any group of people. That is what I want to stand for.
Quote, I am allowing myself to still experience that joy because we did come together as a team, but we are also individuals who are responsible for everything we say and everything we do. Now, in addition to the fellow actresses, the director also chimed in, and this is really where it gets interesting.
I want you to think about this director and think about what he's saying in this quote, because the context is just extra special. So the director does this interview with Deadline and he says, yes, very unfortunately, it is taking up all the space.
The scandal is taking up all the space. And that makes me very sad.
It is very hard for me to think back to the work that I did with Carla Sofia, the trust we shared, the exceptional atmosphere that we had on the set that was indeed based on trust. And when you have that kind of relationship and suddenly you read something that person has said, things that are absolutely hateful and worthy of being hated, of course that relationship is affected.
It is as if you fall into a hole because what Carla Sofia said is inexcusable. And then Deadline responded and said, have you spoken to her? And he responded and said, no, I have not spoken to her and I don't want to.
So again, everybody is icing out Gascon. She is in a self-destructive approach that I can't interfere in, and I really don't understand why she's continuing.
Why is she harming herself? Why? I don't understand it. And what I don't understand about this too is why she's harming people who are very close to her.
I am thinking in this thing of how hurting others, by the way, he's French, so this is probably translated, so if it seems grammatically weird, that is why. I'm thinking in this thing of how hurting others, of how she is hurting the crew and all of these people who worked so incredibly hard on this film.
I am thinking of myself. I am thinking of Zoe and Selina.
I just don't understand why she is continuing to harm us. I'm not getting in touch with her right now because she needs space to reflect and take accountability for her actions.
Now, whether or not you agree with Gascon's tweets, whether or not you feel like they were too far, this response is just ridiculous. These were things that Gascon posted, you know, three years ago at this point.
Gascon is not doing anything to this film at all. Somebody dug up these tweets, they posted them.
This is not Carla and Sophia Gascon actively going after this film and the trust they shared and the actresses and the crew. This is just something that happened and that Gascon is also having to deal with.
It is not just you that is dealing with the reckoning. I mean, Gascon is literally getting canceled right now.
So this is just a very emotional and victim-focused response. But this, again, I told you, remember the director.
This is where the twist comes in. This is when I genuinely got so interested in this story because there are so many layers of covering up

and doing virtue signaling and apologizing. I mean, this film, it is like another level.
So again, I told you to remember this director because this director, as you just heard, is acting so holier than thou. Oh my goodness, what is Sophia doing to us? What's Carla doing to us? All of these things.
What he is doing is actually hoping that people forget about his own controversy that he was dealing with just two weeks ago. This emotional response is just him covering up the fact that he

said... What he is doing is actually hoping that people forget about his own controversy that he was dealing with just two weeks ago.
This emotional response is just him covering up the fact that he said this while promoting his Mexican film. Now obviously, this director, Jacques, he is French.
He is speaking in French. I do not speak French, but I translated this, as many people did online, and what Jacques was saying here is that the Spanish language is for poor people.
The quote specifically is, Spanish is a language of modest countries, developing countries, and of the poor and migrants. So that's not really a good look when you just produced an entire film about the country of Mexico and about the Mexican people.
He also admitted around that same time that he really didn't feel the need to research Mexico before embarking on this film. Now again, there are so many different languages here.
I have people writing about this in Spanish, he's speaking about it in French, but basically that is what he said. He felt no need to go to Mexico to research any of it because he knew everything he needed to know.
And there are a lot of things that are mind boggling to me about this story, but this might take the cake because how do you not even research what you are making a film about? Like that is the bare minimum of your job as a director. Like research is everywhere.
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This all got so bad that he literally had to apologize two weeks before all of the Carla Sofia Gascon stuff came out way before all of that took place. But guys, that is not all.
That is not the end of why people are angry at him. They are also angry at him because he chose to make this movie about Mexico and, you know, Mexican cartels and Mexican people in Paris with three non-Mexican actresses, which apparently is news to Selena Gomez because, you know, she's talking about how these are her people, they're really not her people, and the media is calling her out for that, and they're calling out this director for not hiring any Mexicans.
So the point here, and why I am painting this broad stroke and giving you all of this context, is because way before all of the Carlos stuff started, way before all the trans stuff started, there was already an uproar from Latinos about this film who were angry about how they were represented or not represented in this film. Conveniently, this is also the other thing that is just so sinister to me and also ties into the whole PR strategy and how they protect these films and fight for them for these award shows.
But Netflix and the film's team allegedly tried to hide the fact that there really wasn't any great Mexican representation in the film, and they kept the film out of Latin American countries, literally delaying it until the film had secured nominations to avoid backlash on social media. And obviously, this is kind of a conspiracy, like it has not been confirmed by Netflix or by the distributor, we don't have any messages explaining the reasoning, but we can look at the dates, And we can see that the film originally premiered in May of 2024, that it then came out in the States, I believe in October or November of 2024, and that it only came out in Latin America in January of 2025, after it had secured all of the nominations.
And you know what, they were probably right to do this because, as I said, Jacques had to apologize because there was a lot of backlash. Listen to some of these headlines.
Take it from a Mexican, Emilia Perez is trash. Why Mexicans find Emilia Perez so disrespectful? Why is Emilia Perez hated in Mexico but Oscar nominated in the US? And guys, one of these articles, one of these Emilia Perez hit pieces was actually written by a former colleague of mine,

Giancarlo Sopo, who is a Latino media strategist and a culture writer.

He wrote a great piece about this in IndieWire last week. His headline reads, And this is his opinion piece.
This was released on February 3rd. Now, he wrote, analogies are imperfect but to understand why latinos are appalled by amelia perez

imagine this the academy louds a clan Musical, set in the Deep South, but shot in Paris. Its non-American cast speaks in British and Aussie accents, and the few Black actors are largely relegated to extras.
He went on and said Latinos, especially those from working-class communities along the border, view cartels as the lowest of the low. These aren't code-bound Hollywood thugs like Tony Montana.
Cartels show no mercy as they kidnap, torture, and dismember, including children. And remember, Amelia Perez, the trans star of this film, is a cartel drug leader.
Undergoes gender-affirming surgery and then comes out and is like, beloved by their family and by their community. Everything is fine because now she knows herself and she is you know she has found her true identity whatever it is John Carlo goes on and says their victims number in the hundreds of thousands with no end in sight and it is infuriating to see a ward's body celebrate a film that repackages suffering as a kitschy telenova with garish musical numbers penis to a vagina obviously it's very gar Equally frustrating is Hollywood's obliviousness to regional class divides, which may explain why the few Hispanics who defend Amelia Perez either live nowhere near the border, have financial ties to the project, or can afford to protect themselves from cartel carnage.
So this goes way deeper than just representation. It's not just that the Mexican community is upset that this was not filmed in Mexico, that the director thinks that their language is the lowest of the lows, and that he didn't even feel the need to research Mexico in the slightest, or that they didn't hire any Mexican artists.
It's the fact that he is glamorizing something that terrorizes their country, that they literally have to flee and protect themselves from every single day, not just in Mexico, but also on the border in America. And honestly, this is the most out-of-touch Hollywood thing I've ever heard.
Like, it is so perfect. Like, of course, they would make a movie musical about the Mexican drug cartels and glamorize it because, oh, it's all okay because she's trans.
So then everything's fine and all the people that she, he killed is totally fine because we love them now because they found their true selves. I mean, you literally cannot make this up.
Comedy writers could not create something that is so beautifully insane and beautifully ironic. Now, Giancarlo's article is great because he touches on that.
He really goes deep on that aspect of representation and why people are upset. But his article really shines when he gets to the crux of the issue.
And this is why I and so many others are interested in this story, because it's not just about celebrities and wokeness and Hollywood doing crazy things and all of us being able to laugh at it, you know, laughing at the crazy people in the Capitol, you know, Hunger Games style. The reason why we're all interested in it is because this is the reckoning of everything the left in Hollywood has propped up for the last decade.
Or as Daniel put it, a major realignment that is about to happen. It scrambles everything and it just shows that everything's getting realigned because you would never expect a trans actress who became famous for starring in Mexican telenovelas to necessarily be the person who is spouting all of these bigoted opinions.
It just, it kind of flies in the face of certain cultural expectations we have that her experiences would have taught her. And you might not expect the director of a movie set in Mexico to be so, so kind of, to say such an ignorant thing about the Spanish language after having spent so long trying to get this movie made.
This film was literally pushed into the limelight because of inclusivity. Criticisms from the Mexican people, from just normal people who listen to penis to vagina and went, oh my god, this film is terrible, why is it being nominated?

All of that was shunned and ignored because of inclusivity.

Because it is a story about a trans woman of color.

And this representation and political relevance was all that mattered.

And these were the exact things that tore it down.

And so I think the lesson here for Hollywood is that these projects that you guys prop up

that are driven by identity politics, they are not infallible and they should not be. When you guys look at your Oscar requirements, you know, your diversity requirements, oh, I have a trans person, I have a person of color, whatever, that is not the end-all be-all for good filmmaking.
Audiences are screaming from the rooftops and telling you, this is not what we want. We want genuine, organic, authentic stories.
This is what we want from Hollywood. You haven't listened.
And I think it finally took an Emilia Perez type film to burn it all down, to show you how ridiculous this is to hold Amir up and say, you really nominated a film with a song called Penis to Vagina 13 times at the Academy Awards. And it was destroyed because this infallible trans actress made racist, bigoted tweets.
I mean, genuinely, guys, it is too perfect. And again, in many ways, I feel like this needed to happen.
Like Hollywood desperately needs to have that good, long, hard look in the mirror and realize that this is the result of 10 years of ridiculousness, of prioritizing politics over genuinely good art. And that is why Amelia Perez was created.
I mean, Amelia Perez, in my eyes, is like the baby of the last 10 years. It is completely devoid of authenticity.
It is devoid of any of the real representation that they have said that they've been advocating for. And on top of that, the other thing that I think this film brought up is just to remind us all that these people, the people who brought us Amelia Perez and put Amelia Perez up on this pedestal, they are the people that have been telling us what to think and how to think for the last decade plus, forever at this point.
I mean, think about Meryl Streep. We all think that Meryl Streep is the greatest actor of all time.
We think that because Harvey Weinstein told us that. Think about the politics in this country, the cultural tones.
So many people were misled because of Hollywood, because of actresses. Think about the episode that I did just a couple of weeks ago where Hollywood stars were dictating our perception of the world until it all came crashing down, until we pulled back the curtain and realized, oh my gosh, you're nothing like us.
You don't understand us in the slightest. Why would I listen to you? And the same thing is now happening with the art that these people create.
And so again, I will go to the grave arguing that this is something that desperately needed to happen. And guys, the other thing that is truly interesting, the last thing I will leave you with is that the voting had already happened for the Oscars by the time that all this came out.
Or I think voting was already happening. And a lot of people were trying to lobby that Carla Sophia Gascon should be removed from

the Oscars, that she should have her nomination rescinded, but that did not happen.

And so there is a chance that Carla Sophia Gascon could still win Best Leading Actress

in a Film as the first trans actress to be nominated and win, and I think that that would

just further cement how ridiculous this entire thing is.

And so personally, I kind of hope it happens, because it would just make the story that much better. Okay, that's a wrap.
That was a lot of talking. Alex had my steak.
I'm not rolling anymore, right? No. This is exactly what I need after talking for an hour.
It's just good ranchers. This is Alex.
You're watching Brett in the wild devouring her favorite post-filming snack, an American-raised steak from Good Ranchers. It's well done, just how I like it.
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