When Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won Best Actor and Actress Academy Awards, respectively, three years ago, there was much talk about the doors finally being open for black Americans and other minorities in Hollywood.
This theory seems to have been born out this year in the Oscar nominations in eight major categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor/Actress, Best Supporting Actor/Actress and Best Screenplay (Original and Adaptation).
Ray (about soul music legend Ray Charles) is nominated for Best Picture, Jamie Foxx (Ray) and Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda) are nominated for Best Actor, Latina Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace) for Best Actress, Sophie Okonedo (Hotel Rwanda) for Best Supporting Actress, Foxx again (Collateral) and Morgan Freeman (Million Dollar Baby) for Best Supporting Actor, and Jose Rivera (The Motorcycle Diaries) for Best Adapted Screenplay. By my count, this sample of honors comprises a total of eight nominations in six major categories for our black and Latino brethren.
Meanwhile, there’s a grand total of zero nominations in those same categories for Asian Pacifics.
It’s not that there weren’t worthy candidates (for example, Zhang Ziyi received an acting nomination for a British Academy Award for House of Flying Daggers, and Sandra Oh in Sideways was just as good as her co-stars). It’s just that the Oscars sometimes has a tendency to … well, ignore us.
How else do you explain the Academy’s past snubs of a great filmmaker like Akira Kurosawa (who was nominated only once for Ran), the whole casts of The Last Emperor and The Joy Luck Club, and Ang Lee’s directing work on Sense and Sensibility? There are other examples of highly acclaimed work by Asian artists that was similarly overlooked.
Now it’s dangerous to simply imply that racism is the reason for our community’s lack of love from the little naked gold guy. After all, other very deserving non-Asians have also been dissed by the Academy (one of the greatest filmmakers, Alfred Hitchcock, never won an Oscar). But Asians seem to go missing from the ranks more often than not.
Consider this: 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the first Asian film to ever win the foreign-language film award and the first Asian film to even be nominated for Best Picture.
In almost 80 years of the Academy Awards — a history that encompasses such classic Asian films as Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Tokyo Story, Farewell My Concubine, The Killer, Eat Drink Man Woman, Once Upon a Time in China and many others — nothing made a real impact with the Academy until Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came along. That’s pretty unbelievable.
Before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, only two Asians had ever won Oscars in the major categories: Haing S. Ngor for Best Supporting Actor in The Killing Fields and Miyoshi Umeki for Best Supporting Actor in Sayonara. To be fair, others have been nominated including Ken Watanabe for his acting in The Last Samurai and Sessue Hayakawa in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Plus, Asians like cameraman James Wong Howe and documentarian Jessica Yu have taken home Oscars in the other “less prestigious” categories. But let’s be honest, most people don’t care about those categories because they are not as glamorous.
A big part of this may have to do with who makes up the membership of the Academy (those people who vote on the Oscars). There are two ways one can be invited to join the Academy:
1) You can be nominated for an Oscar. Everyone who receives a nomination is automatically invited to join.
2) The other alternative is that you can be sponsored and championed by Academy members. The Academy receives these recommendations from its members and carefully reviews each candidate before deciding whether to accept him or her.
Either way, it’s tough to get in. So it’s no wonder only a few are invited into this exclusive club every year. But here’s the thing — once you’re in, you’re a member for life. As long as you pay your dues and don’t do anything wrong, you enjoy your membership privileges until you die.
So it’s no surprise that a big chunk of the Academy is composed of “old white guys” who joined decades ago during the days when Asians were still “Orientals” and watching Mickey Rooney do “yellowface” wasn’t necessarily considered offensive.
This isn’t to say that the Academy is made up of a bunch of old racists systematically trying to keep the Asian hordes out. But like a lot of other sectors of American life, the old-boy network still runs deep and strong. Just as the glass ceiling is still a reality in corporate America, a similar barrier exists in Hollywood.
But slowly people like Ang Lee and Ken Watanabe are pushing through the doors of the exclusive boys club. But will they be enough? And if they get in, will they actively work to break the glass ceiling for others to follow? Only time will tell.
Philip W. Chung is a writer and co-artistic director of Lodestone Theatre Ensemble. Lodestone’s Fifth Annual Oscar Party Fundraiser takes place on Feb. 27 in L.A. For more info go to www.lodestonetheatre.org.