For months, the actor Karla Sofía Gascón had been reaping the rewards of leading a prestigious film. She plays the title character in Emilia Pérez, about a Mexican cartel boss who transitions into a woman and seeks to build a more virtuous life. The Spanish-language musical has faced waves of backlash since its release last year—but it has also found a devoted fan base among awards bodies.

Gascón was one of its anchors: She delivered an impassioned speech dedicated to the trans community at the Cannes Film Festival, where she shared the Best Actress prize with her castmates. When Emilia Pérez won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy last month, Gascón movingly addressed the audience. She made history shortly thereafter, becoming the first openly trans performer to earn an Oscar nomination. A relative unknown in the United States, the Spanish actor personified a message of tolerance and acceptance; Emilia Pérez, despite all of the criticism surrounding it, looked to have elevated a star who matched the heroism of Emilia Pérez herself.

But her momentum soon came to a halt. A journalist discovered an array of Gascón’s tweets dating back to 2016 that contained racist language and crude jokes about a range of marginalized communities. In response, the actor stopped following the typical awards-season playbook: She posted defensive updates on Instagram, sent a long-winded statement without the assistance of a public-relations team to The Hollywood Reporter, and personally scheduled a lengthy, tearful interview on CNN en Español. Gascón became Hollywood’s persona non grata, just under a month before the Academy Awards ceremony.

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The actor’s trajectory represents one of the most dramatic implosions of an awards run in Oscars history. Twists and gaffes happening at the tail end of a race—for which this year’s voting round ended on Tuesday—are nothing new. (Gascón’s fellow Best Actress nominee Fernanda Torres weathered her own controversy this season; a clip of her wearing blackface in a comedy sketch resurfaced last month. The I’m Still Here star responded by releasing a measured apology.) But the nature of Gascón’s fall is unusual. Rarely has a nominee’s curated image—that of a righteous up-and-comer, applauded by an industry eager to demonstrate its tolerance—so thoroughly differed from the one conjured by her personal online accounts. Her case is a fascinating look at how industry status can collide with the social-media era: In spite of the awards season’s purported aims to celebrate cinema, a performer’s off-screen narrative can matter just as much as their work.

Gascón’s diminished chances of winning a trophy arguably resulted not so much from the resurfacing of her bigoted tweets, but mainly from the way she diverged from established public-relations guidelines. Oscar campaigns tend to be carefully controlled endeavors, and Netflix, Emilia Pérez’s distributor in the United States, has one of the most experienced awards-strategy teams in Hollywood. The streamer had helped turn Gascón from an unknown in the U.S. into a contender—and on the same day that her old posts garnered attention, Netflix circulated her official apology. “As someone in a marginalized community,” read the standard-issue statement, “I know this suffering all too well and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain.”

But soon afterward—and reportedly without clearing her plans with Netflix—Gascón went rogue. She sent The Hollywood Reporter an additional statement claiming that her tweets were misunderstood, at times even by herself. (“Sometimes I, myself, am not even aware of having written something negative,” she wrote.) She shared thoughts on Instagram about her words being taken out of context. And she scheduled the CNN en Español interview, during which she argued that she’d done nothing wrong. She also claimed that her co-stars—including Zoe Saldaña, the Supporting Actress Oscar front-runner—supported her “200 percent,” despite no public evidence that they shared her sentiments. “I have not committed any crime, nor have I harmed anyone,” she said. “I am not a racist, nor am I anything that all these people have taken it upon themselves to try to make others believe I am.”

The more Gascón tried to salvage her reputation by herself, the more those associated with the film pulled away from her. Shortly after Emilia Pérez nabbed 13 Oscar nominations—the most of any movie this year—Netflix began removing billboards in Los Angeles that singled her out; the company has reportedly restricted her access to the team’s travel funds, making it harder for her to attend more precursor award ceremonies. Gascón responded to comments from the film’s director, Jacques Audiard, about her “self-destructive approach” by pledging on Instagram to stay silent going forward. Earlier this month, Netflix’s chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, addressed the scandal, calling the controversy “a bummer.” (The company is also “reevaluating” its strategy for vetting actors’ social-media accounts, she said.)

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Gascón’s attempt to control her image is singular in its audacity. None of her fellow awards contenders this season has made such bold, unfiltered moves while trying to convince Academy voters that they’re worthy of a trophy. Even before her tweets resurfaced, the Emilia Pérez star had begun deviating from the film’s standard promotional press campaign by chiding Torres’s social-media strategy. Criticizing another nominee’s tactics is an inadvisable step for someone on the Oscar track; the act can come off as combative, and the Academy can penalize attacks against fellow contenders. “There are people working with Fernanda Torres tearing me and Emilia Pérez down,” she claimed in an interview. “That speaks more about their movie than mine.” Gascón later retracted the remarks and explained that she wasn’t targeting her competitor, but merely trying to admonish “toxicity and violent hate speech on social media.” And then, when her past social-media posts came up, she completely ignored the rules of how to face a blowback. She could have followed in Torres’s footsteps—the I’m Still Here actor had just demonstrated how effective sticking with a standard mea culpa can be—yet once again, Gascón diverged from the norm.

Not everyone follows the Oscars playbook, of course. But the other most unconventional campaign this year is notable because it’s so thoroughly unlike what Gascón is doing. Timothée Chalamet, who’s up for his performance as Bob Dylan in the musical biopic A Complete Unknown, certainly seems to be defying the rules of typical press tours, surprising his look-alikes at a contest in New York City and riding a Lime bike onto the red carpet at a premiere, among other antics. Chalamet’s efforts have worked in part because he is an established, controversy-free celebrity, a household name with movie-star appeal. If anything, his well-received run so far, even if he doesn’t win the Oscar, underlines what made Gascón’s Hail Mary fail: Chalamet’s calculated, personality-driven stunts evoke the youthful renegade appeal of the cultural icon he played, courting chatter but not criticism.

Meanwhile, Gascón’s defensive behavior, by turns rebellious and inflammatory, undid the storyline she and Netflix had cultivated for months: that the actor intimately understood why Emilia Pérez succeeded with so many awards-season voters, many of whom are Gascón’s peers. Gascón’s character in the film is supposed to epitomize the human capacity for good, and for overcoming flaws with grace. After the actor’s tweets resurfaced, she emphasized that “light will always triumph over darkness” in her Netflix-approved apology; the statement repositioned Gascón as remorseful about her past, just like Emilia had been. But if Gascón appeared to exemplify the film’s message early in its journey toward Oscar glory, she has come to embody a different narrative—that of a shocking, largely self-inflicted public collapse. It’s not the kind that tends to win someone an Oscar.

Back in nasty, metallic, cocaine-powered ’90s London, where everyone was standing around talking loudly and competitively in overlit rooms, I would find myself from time to time in the company of comedians. Stand-ups, mainly. They were brilliant of course, and miserable of course (because stand-ups have to live with accelerated brains and grotesquely magnified associative powers), and when they got going, the laughs would stack up, bitter, dazzling, progressively more stimulated and rarefied. Until, that is, something truly and originally comedic was said. At which point silence fell, faces straightened, and somebody would gravely observe: “That’s good material.”

For a biography of a man whose business is comedy, Susan Morrison’s Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live is weirdly barren of laughs. Across 600 extremely interesting pages, I LOLed exactly once, and it was at a joke (or what the critic Jesse David Fox calls “a joke-joke”) that the future SNL staffer Alan Zweibel wrote and sold—for $7—to Rodney Dangerfield. Here it is: “Even as an infant I didn’t get any respect. My mother wouldn’t breastfeed me. She said she liked me as a friend.”

Then again, maybe the laughlessness is not so weird: Lorne Michaels, in the words of his collaborator-­nemesis Chevy Chase (in show business, everybody you collaborate with eventually becomes your nemesis), is not “an initiator of humor as much as a believer in humor.” As the creator and impresario of Saturday Night Live and its spin-offs, he has made a career—­an epoch, an oligarchy—­out of coolly appraising, classifying, curating, and to some degree determining the funny. Out of knowing the funny and creating the conditions for it. The bloodier and more dangerous business of being the funny, he has wisely left to others.

And the others, as they go tumbling in furious vulnerability across Morrison’s viewfinder, are fascinating. The rage-filled writers (Michael O’Donoghue) and the exploding clowns (John Belushi, Chris Farley). The alpha entertainers, desperate to please (Conan O’Brien), and the autarkic geniuses who’d be doing it even if no one was watching (Andy Kaufman). I got an education in the groundbreakingness of Lily Tomlin.

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But somehow no one is quite as fascinating as Michaels himself, easing in his faintly reptilian way through showbiz vicissitudes and blinding storms of ego, nurturing brittle artists and disarming corporate thugs, “impervious to refusals,” sending mixed signals, making strange noises of approval or demurral, getting richer and richer, living better and better, quietly arrogating to himself enormous cultural power without ever appearing to break a sweat. Even tripping on psychedelics in Joshua Tree, pre-SNL, ranting to the writer Tom Schiller about the coming revolution in broadcasting—“Now is the time to enter television. We now have the airwaves”—he keeps his cool. “He never becomes noticeably different under any circumstances,” Schiller tells Morrison. “You can’t get through the glaze of brown eyes.”

He was raised Lorne Lipowitz in Forest Hill, an affluent suburb of Toronto that had the distinction (under the alias “Crestwood Heights”) of being the subject of a government-funded social-science study, the findings of which were published in 1956. “Many features of this middle class culture,” noted one contemporary reviewer of Crestwood Heights: A North American Suburb, “reveal the compulsive, ruminative preoccupation with knowledge especially about human behavior.” He added: “One would assume that neurotic and psychosomatic conditions are quite prevalent in this population.” Out of this hothouse of manners and pathology comes the young Lorne, ever watchful, whose first recorded laugh occurs in second grade when he makes a joke at the expense of an overweight girl. Ah, cruel roots of comedy. Later, at the University of Toronto, Lorne takes note of what happens when a political-science professor intentionally mispronounces the name of the Canadian prime minister: “I’d hear the laugh, and I’d think ‘But he didn’t do anything funny.’ It was just that he’d made the students proud that they understood that he’d referred to our prime minister in an unflattering way.” The mainstreaming of that privileged, nostrilly, insider-y laughter might be Michaels’s chief legacy.

The first episode of Saturday Night (the Live would come later) aired on NBC on October 11, 1975, and one way to read Michaels is as a quintessential ’70s guy: a post-counterculture guy, druggily expanded and still trailing wisps of the Age of Aquarius but buzzing now at a lower, thicker frequency. A wised-up materialist, on the same track as fellow plutocrats-to-be David Geffen and Jann Wenner. Commitment to the artist did not preclude commitment to making piles of money: If you do it right, they are the same thing.

And commitment to the artist means managing the artist, handling the artist: Lorne at his Lorne-iest. “He often compares doling out praise to feeding a stray cat,” Morrison writes. What Morrison calls his “emotional-energy efficiency” has protected Michaels from overinvolvement, overinvestment. As the former SNL writer Mark McKinney puts it: “He can’t get into the agonies of generation after generation of broken little toys who show up to write comedy for him.”

Almost nothing in that first episode worked, by the way. Not the sub-Python intro with its repeated only-funny-if-you’re-high use of the word wolverines; not the sweaty, jabbing monologue from a coked-out George Carlin; not Jim Henson’s Muppets trying to be dark and scabrous. (Henson was a great artist, but there was no way his puppets could survive in that environment: Michaels was running his own Muppet Show, with humans.) Awkwardness comes off the screen in waves. Even from 50 years away, you can still hear SNL’s debut softly bombing in dens and dorms and living rooms from coast to coast. You can hear it, in the words of Michaels’s friend Joe Boyd, “laying an egg.”

And yet it did work. With the laughs-that-weren’t-laughs and the frozen druggy vibes, the wizard Michaels had cast his spell. Stealthily tapping into the American public’s violent and bottom­less inferiority complex, he had succeeded in giving viewers the feeling that perhaps they weren’t quite hip enough or clever enough—­or high enough—­for this new brand of humor. The corollary to this, the lighter side as it were, is the invitation to become hip, to initiate yourself, by laughing your head off.

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Which is more or less the sensation of a great SNL sketch. Take the sole comedic triumph, the one truly gorgeous bit of business, from that first episode: Andy Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse sketch. Standing next to a record player in a sports jacket and turtleneck, Kaufman, with a kind of bulging meekness, a glisteningly gleeful timidity, puts the needle on the record. Crackle of vinyl; the Mighty Mouse theme song begins to play. Kaufman stands there. He stares, fidgets. He is waiting—on live TV. The jolly music pumps along; Kaufman twitches; now he is horribly exposed. His psyche, if you could see it, would look like a Francis Bacon painting.

But then, with the song’s refrain—­“HERE I come to save the DAAAAAAY!”—­he is transformed: Gazing grandly, arm raised to hail a grateful population, he mouths the words and wags his hips in time. He radiates triumph. And then just as quickly—­when the line ends—­reverts.

Watching this, watching Kaufman shift on a dime from SOS-blinking hesitancy to suavely billowing superconfidence and back again, you can feel yourself being lifted on the wafts and buffets of your own incredulous mirth to a new aesthetic, a new plane of absurdity, a new something. Michaels, when he talks about Kaufman, sounds atypically wonderstruck: “It was as beautiful a thing as you could witness,” he recalls in Lorne. “He wasn’t enmeshed in the show business of it … There seemed to be some other commitment, something very pure and personal.”

Can you draw a line from that to Dave Chappelle’s SNL monologue on January 18 of this year, to all the Dave Chappelle feelings—­anxiety, more anxiety, even more anxiety, gurgling gratified release—­that he so exquisitely manages? I think you can. Comedy is tension and deliverance from tension, and to maintain a space in the culture where this can happen at the same time every week, where even on an off night, there’ll be a moment that allows the static around your brain to crackle off into the ether: That’s no small thing. Kaufman’s nakedness, Chappelle’s command … they both rely on, feed off, feed into this space—the space that Lorne Michaels created, and has held inviolate or as close to inviolate as he could almost superhumanly manage, for 50 years.