Pop culture analyst Valliant Renegade speculated recently that Disney rigged the People’s Choice Awards to give Rachel Zegler a win that many would argue she most desperately needs. (Especially in light of the company’s upcoming live-action Snow White and the controversy that’s already surrounded it.)

After the major controversy that surrounded Disney’s next big leading lady, Rachel Zegler, some cultural critics are speculating that Disney is going so far as to rig award shows to help her public image.

Related: The Rachel Zegler and Disney’s ‘Snow White’ Controversy: Everything We Know

Rachel Zegler Wins Best Action Movie Star of the Year

At the People’s Choice Awards this year, Rachel Zegler celebrated a win of a fairly prestigious award: the Best Action Movie Star of the Year for her role as Lucy Gray Baird in  The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

Zegler was chosen over The Marvels’ Brie Larson, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’s Chris Pratt, Heart of Stone’s Gal Gadot, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’s Jason Momoa, John Wick: Chapter 4’s Keanu Reeves, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’s Tom Cruise, and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes’  Viola Davis.

Cultural critic Valliant Renegade was skeptical if this win was legitimate or rigged by the Walt Disney Company, noting, ““Let’s not forget that Hollywood studios engage in heavy social manipulation. They all do. We’ve talked about this many times. All these Hollywood Studios hire very expensive PR and advertising marketing firms.”

Valliant Renegade pulled no punches. He commented,

If you were the Walt Disney Company and you had already spent 200 some odd million dollars filming Snow White, a live-action remake of it starring Rachel Zegler, who then stuck her foot in her mouth and effectively sank the production to the point that Disney had to pull it off of the release shelf and move it back one entire year for massive reshoots because they had to fix the things that audiences immediately and reflexively gagged at. Well, you might just want to raise the specter and the public sentiment of its principal character Rachel Zegler playing Snow White as much as you possibly could.”

While bad press or unfair criticism is certainly not new conceptually when it comes to the newer leading ladies of Disney—think of all the racist criticisms Halle Bailey faced (not to be confused with the perfectly reasonable ones relating to her performance)—the issues with Zegler in particular went beyond the fact that she’s Latina.

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While Zegler has changed her tune now, she initially spent a lot of time trash-talking the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which, as one might imagine, went down incredibly poorly. In fact, her public image was so terrible that even her apology video read as fake, with some accusing her of “playing the victim.”

Ultimately, Disney and other Hollywood studios are certainly not above throwing money at a problem to make it go away, but the real question remains: is an award enough to fix the public memory of Zegler?

Or maybe better yet, did anyone care enough about the scandal, and Disney was assured a movie that would do fine theatrically?

The problem is that Disney can’t afford any more movies that do just “fine.” They need a hit. And maybe they’re putting all of their resources into their upcoming live-action of Snow White to make sure it’s just that.