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They Shoulda Been Contenders

Three Asian/Asian Am. films deserving of Oscar gold

Every year, we bemoan the lack of Asian nominees at the Academy Awards. But let’s be honest — usually the pickings are slim. But this past year, three films deserving of nominations in major categories were totally ignored.

SECRET SUNSHINE

Should have been nominated for: Best Foreign-Language Film

Main reason it wasn’t nominated: The Academy’s foreign-language film nominating committee members’ average age is a million years old.

The Academy’s aging foreign-language film nominating committee was blasted by critics for ignoring daring, critically acclaimed films like this masterpiece from South Korea.

Jeon Do-Yeon turns in a tour-de-force performance as a widow who moves to a small town with her young son to start a new life, but goes through a wrenching experience that would test even Job’s resolve.

Never mind that Jeon won the “Best Actress” award at last year’s Cannes (becoming only the second Asian actress in history to do so), and that a poll of over 100 top critics voted this the best film yet to be distributed in the U.S. — it was clearly too dark and challenging for the out-of-touch foreign language committee, who was unable to see that this was one of the finest films of the year. If there’s any justice, Secret Sunshine will find an American distributor this year, and Jeon will be nominated for “Best Actress” in 2009.

THE NAMESAKE

Should have been nominated for: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress (Tabu), Best Supporting Actor (Irrfan Khan)

Main reason it wasn’t nominated: Released too early in the year for Academy members to remember.

Director Mira Nair has made some great films in the past but nothing as sublime as her take on the best-selling novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, expertly adapted by writer Sooni Taraporevala.

Set in New York and Calcutta and spanning decades, the film follows Ashoke (Khan) and his young bride, Ashima (Tabu), as they leave India to make a new life in the U.S. Jump ahead a few years and their Americanized teenage son, Gogol (Harold and Kumar’s Kal Penn), comes into conflict with his parents’ old world ways.

The Namesake could have easily been another clichéd story of assimilation, but Nair creates a story that slowly builds beyond the obvious until it becomes something transcendent.

This may arguably be the best film ever made about Asian immigrants in America — full of loving details that everyone who is an immigrant or comes from a family of immigrants will recognize.

LUST, CAUTION

Should have been nominated for: Best Director, Best Actress (Tang Wei)

Main reason it wasn’t nominated: After the huge success of Brokeback Mountain, the film’s inability to live up to the same benchmark marked it a failure.

Director Ang Lee correctly predicted that his latest would have trouble finding an audience in the U.S. Was it the public’s aversion to subtitled, non-martial arts Asian films? Or prudishness from a nation of former Puritans scared off by the NC-17 sexual gymnastics? Whatever the reason, the film was met with mostly indifference by American audiences and mixed critical reviews.

The film plunges us into the world of China in the midst of the Japanese occupation, and a young freedom fighter (newcomer Tang Wei) who must seduce and kill a collaborator played by Tony Leung.

Some of the character’s motivations remain unclear in the script, but Lee creates a fully inhabited world of intrigue and emotion that transports the viewer into what at times feels like a documentary.

And the performance by Tang Wei (nominated for an IFC Independent Spirit Acting Award) is star-making. For those looking for the next generation’s Maggie Cheung or Gong Li, search no further.

Philip W. Chung is a writer and co-artistic director of Lodestone Theatre Ensemble. Lodestone’s annual Oscar party fund-raiser will be on Sunday, Feb. 24, in
Los Angeles. For more info: www.lodestonetheatre.org.

Comments

Phil:
One more nod from this nodding head sans hat.
Bingo !
And three times in a row, at that.
Like shooting ducks in a gallery.
BUT;
Consider the obvious that “Oscar” is, at heart, a popularity/boxoffice-take beauty contest rather than an authentic competetion between apples and oranges in the uncharted fields of esthetic and artistic merit.
The Sacramento Bee drama pundit yesterday noted that Kate Hepburn is the Oscar champ, holding FOUR golden boys. Well, in these eyes at least, la Hepburn was a wonderful lady, an outspoken citizen, AND an incontrovertible PERSONA, onscreen and off, bar none.
But, I, personally, have never been privy to a Hepburn onscreen performance that was discrete from the Hepburn persona, which is to say, was she, truly?, an “actress”?
Like our Meryl Streep, for one.
Oh, and having just Wikipedia’d Herr Doktor Heinz Kissinger, how can “Oscars” hold a candle next to THE Nobel PEACE award, awarded in ‘73? to the template for Dr. Strangelove?
It is bemusing to note that France and several Latin-American nations have outstanding “legal” questions for the apologist/promulgater of American “realpolitik” of the past half-century and more which should shame the nation.
So much for “honors,” reel and real.
Time will separate the wheat from the chaff in both.
But, the sale of Variety and Daily Variety notwithstanding, the day will long be dawning before the western “audience,” not the “critics,” will see and parse and appreciate cinematic performances beyond the scope and biases of “western” ethnoculturalisms.
Meanwhile, continue your lonely “crusade,” because it DOES matter, and because, enfin, it is the TRUTH.
Frank Eng
P.S.: What with even overseas Americans voting the consensual two-to-one for Obama yesterday?, I think it high time that the Obama Campaign and the Secret Service people should consider beefing up security at ALL times now. Those macho privateeers shoot to kill, as in Iraq today, in Allende’s Chile, in Cambodia, AND East Timor. By the way, have they hearkened to a recent report, was it in the London Guardian?, or one of those “progressive” online blogs?, that those dratted Mainlanders have mainlined the liquefaction of COAL into OIL??? And on an astonishing scale at that. Ah, what “interesting” times we survive in, including online recipes for RAT.

–Frank Eng on Feb 21, 2008
Phil:
A propos your above thesis, I am driven to call your, and any cinephile’s, attention to today’s London Guardian online piece by Harriet Lane? about Viggo Mortensen’s thoughts in re his “besf actor” nomination.
Mortensen says it ALL, and his sidebars are equally to the existentialist point(s).
And I still relish his then 6-year-old son’s comment upon leaving the theater after a screening of that puffed-up
spectacle, “Titanic,” that it “should have been about the ship”?
Mortensen won’t “win,” but, then, Heath Ledger wasn’t even nominated, was he?
No, few today have seen the likes of the entire cast of Bergman’s “Fanny och Alexander,” but each and every one of them would put the majority of Oscar nominees in the pale, if not outright “shame.”
So, take heart, all three of your above nominees may very likely eclipse the p.r. wonders in the textbooks of future cineastes.

–Frank Eng on Feb 22, 2008
I agree, The Namesake was touching, and beautifully adapted from the novel. I found an equally touching film trailer about the screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, at http://www.avanprojects.com

–G Halva on May 13, 2008

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