Zoe Saldaña is “still processing” the controversy that has embroiled her Oscar-nominated film “Emilia Pérez.”
Saldaña’s costar Karla Sofía Gascón recently came under fire for resurfaced, offensive tweets with anti-Muslim, anti-diversity and racist language. Before the posts were unearthed, the film won four Golden Globes — including one for Saldaña — and appeared to be headed for repeat success at the Oscars in March.
In an interview with Variety‘s “Awards Circuit” podcast, which dropped Thursday, Saldaña expressed her sadness that the controversy is overshadowing the film’s historic achievements.
“I’m sad. Time and time again, that’s the word because that is the sentiment that has been living in my chest since everything happened,” she said. “I’m also disappointed. I can’t speak for other people’s actions. All I can attest to is my experience, and never in a million years did I ever believe that we would be here.”
Saldaña said she’s trying to strike the complicated balance between acknowledging bad behavior while also celebrating a film and a performance that made her proud.
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“I’m allowing myself to still experience that joy because we did come together as a team,” she said. “But we are also individuals who are responsible for everything that we say and everything that we do.”
“I can still stand by a body of work that I can be proud of,” she later reiterated, adding that she “will always be a hopeful person.”
Saldaña, who has frequently spoken out against racism, gender inequality and stereotypical representation of Latinx people, also made it clear that she denounces Gascón’s language and ideas.
“I do not support any negative rhetoric of racism and bigotry towards any group of people,” she said. “That is what I want to stand for.”
Saldaña said she will use this experience as an opportunity to grow.
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“You may believe that it’s just a statement I came up with alongside my team, but at the end of the day, when I can’t speak on behalf of anyone else, I can only speak on behalf of myself and what I witnessed,” she said. “And that needs to be enough for now. I’m still processing. I certainly think that this is a learning experience. Everything in life is a learning experience for all of us. And the point of uncomfortable events is for the sake of evolution. So I hope that we continue moving in the right direction.”
Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Karla Sofía Gascón star in the divisive Netflix musical “Emilia Pérez.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The French-produced, Spanish-language musical directed by Jacques Audiard follows Gascón‘s titular character, a Mexican cartel boss who secretly undergoes gender-affirming surgery with the help of a lawyer, played by Saldaña. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, where it won the jury prize and the best actress award for its female ensemble, which includes Selena Gomez.
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Before Gascón’s posts became the center of discussion about the film, audiences had already levied criticism against the movie’s portrayals of Mexico and transgender identity.
After the tweet controversy erupted, Gascón deactivated her X account, but has not remained silent.
In an interview that Netflix had not authorized, Gascón appeared on CNN en Español and said, “I have been convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned without a trial and without the option to defend myself.”
Gascón also told CNN that Saldaña supports her. Saldaña addressed that claim in the Variety interview by taking “a long blink” and not confirming. She instead reiterated that she did not support Gascón’s views.
The streamer has subsequently halted Gascón’s awards campaign. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Gascón will no longer attend the AFI Awards, Critics Choice Awards, Producers Guild Awards (where she was set to present) or Santa Barbara International Film Festival. She has already been removed from some of Netflix’s digital awards campaigns.
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Spanish-language book publisher Dos Bigotes also announced Thursday that it would suspend its plans to republish a revised version of Gascón’s 2018 biographical novel. The publishing house specializes in uplifting diverse authors and books with LGBTQ+ and feminist themes. In its statement, the organization said, while its leaders did not want to “feed controversy,” they felt Gascón’s values and ideals are inconsistent with their own.
“Emilia Pérez” is nominated for a leading 11 Oscars and Gascón is the first out transgender actor to be nominated in an acting category.
A former executive at Live Nation, the world’s largest live entertainment company, is suing the company, alleging that he was wrongfully terminated after he raised concerns about alleged financial misconduct and improper accounting practices.
Nicholas Rumanes alleges he was “fraudulently induced” in 2022 to leave a lucrative position as head of strategic development at a real estate investment trust to create a new role as executive vice president of development and business practice at Beverly Hills-based Live Nation.
In his new position, Rumanes said, he raised “serious and legitimate alarm” over the the company’s business practices.
As a result, he says, he was “unlawfully terminated,” according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
“Rumanes was, simply put, promised one job and forced to accept another. And then he was cut loose for insisting on doing that lesser job with integrity and honesty,” according to the lawsuit.
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He is seeking $35 million in damages.
Representatives for Live Nation were not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes a week after a federal jury in Manhattan found that Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had operated a monopoly over major concert venues, controlling 86% of the concert market.
Rumanes’ lawsuit describes a “culture of deception” at Live Nation, saying its “basic business model was to misstate and exaggerate financial figures in efforts to solicit and secure business.”
Such practices “spanned a wide spectrum of projects in what appeared to be a company-wide pattern of financial misrepresentation and misleading disclosures,” the lawsuit states.
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Rumanes says he received materials and documents that showed that the company inflated projected revenues across multiple venue development projects.
Additionally, Rumanes contends that the company violated a federal law that requires independent financial auditing and transparency and instead ran Live Nation “through a centralized, opaque structure” that enables it to “bypass oversight and internal checks and balances.”
In 2010, as a condition of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, the newly formed company agreed to a consent decree with the government that prohibited the firm from threatening venues to use Ticketmaster. In 2019 the Justice Department found that the company had repeatedly breached the agreement, and it extended the decree.
Rumanes contends that he brought his concerns to the attention of the company’s management, but his warnings were “repeatedly ignored.”
At the centre of Madhuvidhu directed by Vishnu Aravind is a house where only men reside, three generations of them living in harmony. Unlike the Anjooran household in Godfather, this is not a house where entry is banned to women, but just that women don’t choose to come here. For Amrithraj alias Ammu (Sharafudheen), the protagonist, 28 marriage proposals have already fallen through although he was not lacking in interest.
When a not-so-cordial first meeting with Sneha (Kalyani Panicker) inevitably turns into mutual attraction, things appear about to change. But some unexpected hiccups are waiting for them, their different religions being one of them. Writers Jai Vishnu and Bipin Mohan do not seem to have any major ambitions with Madhuvidhu, but they seem rather content to aim for the middle space of a feel-good entertainer. Only that they end up hitting further lower.
After more than two and a half years of research, planning and construction, Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, will open June 20.
Co-founded by new media artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the museum anchors the $1-billion Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA complex across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Its first exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” created by Refik Anadol Studio, was inspired by a trip to the Amazon and uses vast data sets to immerse visitors in a machine-generated sensory experience of the natural world.
The architecture of the space, which Anadol calls “a living museum,” is used to reflect distant rainforest ecosystems, including changing temperature, light, smell and visuals. Anadol refers to these large-scale, shimmering tableaus as “digital sculptures.”
“This is such an important technology, and represents such an important transformation of humanity,” Anadol said in an interview. “And we found it so meaningful and purposeful to be sure that there is a place to talk about it, to create with it.”
The 35,000-square-foot privately funded museum devotes 25,000 square feet to public space, with the remaining 10,000 square feet holding the in-house technology that makes the space run. Dataland contains five immersive galleries and a 30-foot ceiling. An escalator by the entrance will transport guests to the experiences below. The museum declined to say how much Dataland, designed by architecture firm Gensler, cost to build.
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An isometric architectural rendering of Dataland. The 25,000-square-foot AI arts museum also contains an additional 10,000 square feet of non-public space that holds its operational technology.
(Refik Anadol Studio for Dataland)
Dataland will collect and preserve artificial intelligence art and is powered by an open-access AI model created by Anadol’s studio called the Large Nature Model. The model, which does not source without permission, culls mountains of data about the natural world from partners including the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This data, including up to half a billion images of nature, will form the basis for the creation of a variety of AI artworks, including “Machine Dreams.”
“AI art is a part of digital art, meaning a lineage that uses software, data and computers to create a form of art,” Anadol explained. “I know that many artists don’t want to disclose their technologies, but for me, AI means possibilities. And possibilities come with responsibilities. We have to disclose exactly where our data comes from.”
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Sustainability is another responsibility that Anadol takes seriously. For more than a decade, Anadol has devoted much thought to the massive carbon footprint associated with AI models. The Large Nature Model is hosted on Google Cloud servers in Oregon that use 87% carbon-free, renewable energy. Anadol says the energy used to support an individual visit to the museum is equivalent to what it takes to charge a single smartphone.
Anadol believes AI can form a powerful bridge to nature — serving as a means to access and preserve it — and that the swiftly evolving technology can be harnessed to illuminate essential truths about humanity’s relationship to an interconnected planet. During a time of great anxiety about the power of AI to disrupt lives and livelihoods, Anadol maintains it can be a revolutionary tool in service of a never-before-seen form of art.
“The works generate an emergent, living reality, a machine’s dream shaped by continuous streams of environmental and biological data. Within this evolving system, moments of recognition and interpretation emerge across different forms of knowledge,” a news release about the museum explains. “At the same time, the exhibition registers loss as part of this expanded field of perception, most notably in the Infinity Room, where visitors encounter the 1987 recording of the last known Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a now-extinct bird whose unanswered call becomes part of the work.”
“It’s very exciting to say that AI art is not image only,” Anadol said. “It’s a very multisensory, multimedium experience — meaning sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all together in conversation.”
