Karla Sofía Gascón will not be voting for the next Best Picture winner. The Spanish actress, who was nominated this year for Best Actress for “Emilia Pérez,” was not on the list of 534 people whom the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited to join. Gascón’s co-star Adriana Paz, who was not nominated, was among the 2025 invitees. Their “Emilia Pérez” co-star Zoe Saldaña, who won this year for Best Supporting Actress, was already a member.
An Oscar nomination gives a person automatic consideration for Academy membership, exempting them from the usual branch rules that in the case of the Actors Branch require three theatrical film credits “of a caliber that reflects the high standards of the Academy.”
But while a nomination almost always results in an invitation to join the Academy, that invitation is not guaranteed. In this case, a membership committee from the Actors Branch would make its recommendations and then the Academy Board of Governors would vote to approve or deny every branch committee’s recommendations.
Gascón, who found herself at the center of a prolonged controversy this past winter due to the discovery of racist tweets she had previously sent, is only the second first-time Best Actress nominee from the past 10 years not to be offered AMPAS membership immediately following their nomination. (Yalitza Aparicio from “Roma” was nominated in 2019 and not invited to join the Academy until 2020.)
Conversely, recent first-time acting nominees Lily Gladstone, Sandra Hüller, Andra Day, Cynthia Erivo, Lady Gaga, Ruth Negga and Brie Larson were all immediately invited to join. (Michelle Yeoh, Ana de Armas and Andrea Riseborough had already been invited before their first Oscar nominations.)
Gascón made history in January when she became the first openly trans woman to be nominated for an acting Oscar. But the joyous milestone was overshadowed days later by the tweet scandal, which involved bigoted remarks about George Floyd, anti-Islam and -vaccination views and complaints that previous Oscars ceremonies had been too woke.
The controversy hit right during peak campaign season. Gascón issued multiple apologies (one of them on CNN en Español) and skipped key awards events leading up to the Oscars, sparking speculation that she would not attend the ceremony. A few days before the show, Academy CEO Bill Kramer condemned the actress’ tweets (“The Academy does not condone hate speech — I want to be very clear about that,” he said at the time) but did not rescind her invitation to the ceremony. In the end, she attended, weathered host Conan O’Brien’s inevitable joke about the incident and soon after proclaimed that she was committed to “continuing to learn and listen.”
The Academy had no comment about Gascón’s exclusion from the list of new invitees.
(Steve Pond contributed to this report.)
