Conan O'Brien Pulled No Punches With His Most Brutal Oscars 2025 Monologue Joke

We all knew Conan O'Brien, the host of the 97th annual Academy Awards, wouldn't play anything safe — and his joke about Best Actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón (from "Emilia Pérez") made that quite clear.

While making a joke about the best picture nominee "Anora," O'Brien noted, ""Little fact for you: 'Anora' uses the F-word 479 times." That's when he went for the jugular, so to speak: "That's three more than the record set by Karla Sofía Gascón's publicist." (O'Brien followed it with an impression of Gascón's publicist "You tweeted WHAT?!" and added a little jig to spice things up.)

Again, nobody should be surprised that O'Brien went with such a bold joke, but also, Gascón was in the audience when he said it, which makes that joke even bolder. Still, what was O'Brien even talking about? What was Gascón posting on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter? We'll refresh your memory, but buckle up.

When Karla Sofía Gascón received an Academy Award nomination for "Emilia Pérez," there was legitimate cause for excitement; she became the first trans woman to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in the award show's history. Unfortunately for her, the movie was dogged with (also legitimate) criticism right from the start thanks to the fact that its director, Jacques Audiard, did little to no research on Mexico before making the film (by his own admission, no less!). Even more unfortunately for Gascón, her own views are ... troubling, to say the very least.

Without getting too much into the specifics — largely because the specifics are so offensive that reprinting many of Gascón's views here would be deeply unacceptable — the bottom line is that Gascón expressed a lot of racist and hateful views through her social media posts that ultimately destroyed her reputation. This feels frustrating on multiple levels, because Gascón's nomination marked what appeared to be a new era for the Academy — but the problem is that the progress achieved by her nomination was essentially undone, in a respect, by her deeply bigoted views. (It feels important to note that, when Zoe Saldaña won her award for best supporting actress for the film, she did not thank Gascón.)

With that said, "Emilia Pérez" is streaming on Netflix now.