Her tears seem less like heartfelt concern and more like a calculated form of damage control after her latest film crashed and burned spectacularly in Mexico.
Selena Gomez just tried pulling off what she could not deliver in her latest box office flop: a convincing performance. In a now-deleted Instagram video, the entertainer sobbed over deportations under the new Trump administration. “I wish I could do something,” she whimpered, tears streaming down her face.
The problem with these theatrics is their glaring inconsistency. Americans can respect principled celebrity activism, even when they disagree with it, but not when it only surfaces to serve hyper-partisan narratives.
Where were these sobbing displays when Barack Obama’s immigration policies earned him the moniker “deporter in chief”? Where was her anguish when Joe Biden’s border fiasco left thousands of migrant children at the mercy of cartel violence and human traffickers? Gomez’s claim that Trump is targeting “[her] people” doesn’t even make sense — Mexican nationals have been a minority of illegal border crossings since 2017, and she was born in Texas. If she were concerned about attacks against her people, she’d be crying over the murder of Jocelyn Nungaray, the twelve-year-old Houston girl who was sexually assaulted and killed by illegal immigrants from Venezuela.
If your outrage over deportations depends on who’s in the White House, then deportations aren’t really what you’re upset about. Her tears seem less like heartfelt concern and more like a calculated form of damage control after her latest film, cartel cabaret Emilia Pérez, crashed and burned spectacularly in Mexico last weekend. Credit where credit is due: Gomez, ever the savvy self-marketer, knows exactly how to spin a debacle into a cause célèbre. When your movie tanks south of the border, where do you go? Straight to Hollywood, where trade publications will eagerly swallow the bait, especially if it comes wrapped in a tirade against Donald Trump.
The numbers tell the story that Gomez and Netflix are desperately trying to bury before it reaches the Academy’s voters, who just showered the film with a baffling 13 Oscar nominations. According to El Financiero, the movie eked out a pathetic 1.5 million pesos (about $74,000 USD). Another Latin American outlet called it a “resounding failure,” noting the film has “generated widespread disgust” for trivializing Mexican culture. Screenwriter Héctor Guillén slammed it as “a racist Eurocentric mockery.”
The outrage is entirely justified. The filmmakers behind this trainwreck seem to have darkened the fair complexion of Gomez’s European co-star, Karla Sofia Gascón, who portrays a Mexican cartel leader. Meanwhile, the film’s plot — about a cartel boss becoming a women’s rights activist — has been blasted by everyone from LGBT groups to critics and audiences. A moviegoer described it as “a case study in how to combine every cliché, ignorance, and lack of respect toward one of the most serious humanitarian crises of our time.”
The biggest blows have been reserved for Gomez, who plays the drug kingpin’s wife. Eugenio Derbez, one of Mexico’s most respected actors, described her Spanish as “indefensible” on a podcast. While I wouldn’t ordinarily fault someone for struggling with a foreign language, it is true that much of the film is incomprehensible to native speakers. Watching it in Paris last fall, I had to rely on my rusty two years of high school French to decipher its subtitles and make sense of what was being said in Spanish — a language I’ve spoken since childhood.
Social media has turned the movie into a meme factory, with users roasting the awkwardly translated lines that French director Jacques Audiard tasked Gomez with delivering. Adding insult to injury, as Infobae reports, videos are now surfacing of Mexican audiences laughing during screenings — unfortunately for the star, they’re not laughing with her.
Amidst the catastrophic reception and Gascón comparing the film’s critics to Nazis, Netflix has lost control of the narrative, leaving Gomez’s PR team to bank on Tinseltown media swooping in to white-knight the film’s Oscar campaign. They might fool entertainment reporters, but you know who isn’t buying it? Latinos. Trump’s border enforcement policies actually poll well with Hispanics — many of whom are rejecting Emilia Pérez en masse, and whom she now claims to be supporting but had no qualms caricaturing during production.
That’s how we know Gomez’s tears weren’t for migrants — but for herself in yet another staged act in the hollow theater of performative celebrity activism. And, like the ghastly film she’s promoting, her histrionics landed with a resounding thud.