My kids were excited that Ke Huy Quan was in this movie - they recognized his name from The Goonies. Good to see this result all around.
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She was.
They also showed a link one could visit to see folks that were not included in the broadcast.
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Hashtag OscarsNotSoWhiteThisOneTimeForAChange!
Looks at the rest of the winners… maybe I spoke too soon. Still, it was nice to see EEAAO and the cast get some (well deserved) love.
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I tried watching this movie on the plane, being a Yeoh fan.
But I found it boring and cliche according to standard asian movie plot. Maybe its new for hollywood.
When you say “Asian”, what do you mean? Hong Kong action movies? Bollywood? Korean melodramas? None of which are a good fit for EEAAO, so why not provide an example or two that proves your point about the non-uniqueness of this particular film?
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Or Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-type “Asian movie?
I didn’t think there was a standard plot that was required to be classified as an “Asian movie.”
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Ah yes the classic Asian plot about hopping through universes to relate to your gay second generation immigrant kid against the backdrop of American working class drudgery. There must have been a hundred of them!
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What was really interesting was the way the Academy tried to make some acknowledgement that Animation isn’t just for kids. The last few years more and more experimental films are breaking through to get nominated in the shorts category at least.
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I’m sure at least one anime has half those plot points. They tend toward the batshit crazy.
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There’s really only one movie.
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Um… how many minutes of it did you watch? Because it is quite the opposite of the words that you use to describe it if you watch beyond the first 20 minutes.
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Though I have to say, the more I think about this, the angrier I get. It’s great that Michelle Yeoh was recognized, but it’s ridiculous and grotesque that she’s the first Asian actress to win in the nearly century long history of the Oscars. I teared up a bit with Ke Huy Quan winning, given his history as a child actor and then decades not working as an actor, only to return with this triumph - but now I’m just pissed that Hollywood racism denied him those decades of work. This award is the admission that he didn’t get work not because he wasn’t good, but because there just weren’t roles for him… or anyone like him. And given what an anomaly this movie is, there still aren’t.
I was just reading something about how an earlier attempt to make “Crazy Rich Asians” had an executive insist that the lead needed to be white… Hollywood won’t change, even with these successes, as their insistence that movies couldn’t be good/successful with non-white leads wasn’t based on evidence to begin with.
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The Prince Charles Cinema (in London) has been showing 35th anniversary (
) screenings of Akira, I went along yesterday afternoon. I’d forgotten just how delightfully bonkers it was.
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Yep. You’re reminding me of an FBook post by Rebecca Solnit:
Memo to my fellow white people ostentatiously complaining about how they didn’t like EEAAO. I loved the film but if I didn’t I’d be aware how meaningful it is to other people–notably Asian and Asian American viewers-- and not dump on their joy. It’s a huge breakthrough film in a white-dominated industry, and some of you are sounding pretty…checked-out…in your grousing.
There are lots of other works of art where it’s very clear how meaningful it is to someone else, often because they have long gone unrepresented and overlooked, and if it’s not resonating the same way for me, it’s my goal to be attuned to why it resonates for them, not foreground my grumpy limitations and my luxury of already having films/ music/ stories/ songs enough about people like me. But there’s also always the question of why something doesn’t resonate. Can you not identify with characters of another race/sexual orientation/background or enjoy spending time watching their lives unfold? If not, you might want to explore that. I’m not saying everyone must like it; but I am saying that thinking about the why or why not could be useful. Black journalist Eugene Robinson wrote today: "That is a level of Asian representation we have never seen before at the Oscars. In the past, the message from Hollywood to Asian actors and creators has ranged from, effectively, “squeeze yourself into this stereotyped pigeonhole” to “just stay the hell away.”’
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There was a period of a couple of years when Michelle Yeoh also stopped working as an actor, for a similar reason: the only roles she was being offered were so offensively stereotypical that she just wouldn’t take them.
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Lest this gold/blue moment get lost in the shuffle.
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It’s funny, I gravitate towards fiction with characters not like myself - that kind of seems like the point of fiction? (Although when characters are “like me,” I can’t identify with them at all - the closer they are, the more alienating. I feel like I should be able to identify, but can’t.)
Edit: My point being, that even if I’m a weirdo, Hollywood’s idea that white audiences can’t stand seeing non-white leads is total bullshit. Non-white audiences can handle it. The kids are all watching K-dramas, for goodness sake! All Hollywood does, with its racism, is deny a diversity of voices and stories, to its detriment.
Working outside the US was the only way she could have a career. (It’s pretty much the whole history of Asian-American actors in a nutshell… I keep seeing interviews with Asian-American actors who talk about how they’ve been “helpfully” told by industry insiders to leave the US for Asia if they want to work.)
I was just reading about a recent project that fell apart that had Yeoh as a lead - executives insisted it needed someone “higher profile” to star in it. It’s nuts.
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