We’ve now entered the whisper campaign portion of the awards season, except the whispers are actually screams. Are your ears ringing too?

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope’s Friday newsletter. The Oscars are in 30 days — not that I’m counting.

‘Emilia Pérez’ keeps making the wrong kind of news

Watching “Saturday Night Live” last weekend to see Timothée Chalamet make like Bob Dylan (not bad), I laughed at the “Weekend Update” joke about the Oscars.

“The Oscar nominations were announced with the musical ‘Emilia Pérez’ leading the pack with 13 total viewers,” Michael Che said. You see what he did there, mixing the movie’s relative obscurity with the general public with its overwhelming support from academy voters.

If only “Emilia Pérez” maintained a similar low profile in its awards campaign. The movie has come under fire for its depiction of trans people, inspired hatred from Mexicans for insensitivity and a lack of representation (not to mention director Jacques Audiard’s “didn’t study much” apathy toward cultural understanding) and agitated “Wicked” die-hards upset that their musical, the one possessing songs that are actually good, has seemingly been eclipsed.

Now in the past couple of days, “Emilia Pérez’s” Oscar-nominated star Karla Sofía Gascón has been in the news, first for criticizing the online campaign of fellow lead actress nominee Fernanda Torres and then for a series of social media posts, primarily from 2020-21, in which she expressed a variety of insensitive remarks about Muslim people and Islam. (The posts were first publicized on an X thread by Canadian writer Sarah Hagi.)

Gascón was never going to win an Oscar. Now, you have to wonder whether the controversy surrounding her and an overall fatigue with the outrages associated with “Emilia Pérez” are going to sink the film’s chances to take home the best picture Oscar — or any Oscars at all. Gascón has pulled out of all her scheduled media interviews. (She was scheduled to talk with The Times for a profile today.) You’d imagine her Oscar-nominated co-star Zoe Saldaña is horrified by the prospect of having to answer questions about all of this.

“It feels like every day there’s a new affront associated with this movie,” an academy member belonging to the producers branch told me. “It’s twisted. A movie whose whole Oscar campaign revolves around its audacity now is being destroyed by these reckless comments made by its star and director.”

Want to read more about “Emilia Pérez”? Sure you do! Writing for The Times’ De Los, JP Brammer looked at “Johanne Sacreblu,” the short film parody of “Emilia Pérez” from Mexican filmmaker Camila Aurora, which, he notes, also serves as a “layered criticism of Hollywood’s exoticization of Latin America, and the vapidity of its representation of Latinos.”

“The poorly drawn mustaches, mimes and baguettes in ‘Johanne Sacreblu’ assert that ‘representation’ is most often entirely cosmetic and reliant on almost offensively obvious signifiers meant not for the community being depicted but for people who want to feel good for seeing that community being depicted at all, people who need their diversity in all caps and a ridiculously large font for it to be legible,” Brammer writes.

Zoe Saldaña, left, Selena Gomez and Karla Sofía Gascón star in “Emilia Perez.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Kenny Turan’s new book lands

I’m going to do a 180-degree pivot here and plug a book from my old friend, former Times film critic Kenneth Turan. “Louis B. Mayer & Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation” centers on the years in the 1920s and ’30s when the two men turned MGM into Hollywood’s most successful movie studio.

Charles Arrowsmith reviewed it for The Times, writing that “as a record of a paradigm-shifting partnership, this is an entertaining, literate and beautifully crafted contribution to Hollywood history.”

Having enjoyed a great many conversations with Kenny in the office and sitting in screening rooms waiting for movies to start, I can tell you that few people know and understand the history of Hollywood better than he does. Amid all the noise going on right now, be it in Washington or here in town, it is a pleasure to sit down and read something written with intelligence and authority — not to mention genuine appreciation. Kenny’s book will be in stores on Tuesday.

Former Times film critic Kenneth Turan.

(Patricia Williams)