Michelle Yeoh has long been an icon and a legend, with or without an Oscar. But whatever happened at the Dolby Theatre on Sunday night would always be about so much more. For anyone from a community that Hollywood has historically shut out, awards — for better or worse — often bear the weight of history.
For much of the night, many of us nervously waited with bated breath to see if she would actually win, as well as before every award for “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” which remarkably ended up winning seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Yet all of that was far from assured, given the academy’s abysmal history when it comes to representation and inclusion.
Everything loomed so large: The prospect of Yeoh becoming the first Asian actor to win an Oscar in the Best Actress category (and only the second woman of color ever) and the grim statistics. In fact, up until Sunday, more white women had won Best Actress for playing Asian characters in yellowface (one: Luise Rainer in the 1937 adaptation of “The Good Earth”) than, uh, actual Asian women, period (zero). In a nod to that history, Halle Berry, until now the first and only woman of color to win the Best Actress Oscar, presented the award to Yeoh on Sunday night.
Going into the ceremony, the “Everything Everywhere All At Once” star’s win or loss carried so much more weight than it would for the award season frontrunner Cate Blanchett, who has already won two Oscars and been nominated eight times. While Blanchett’s performance in “TÁR” was undeniably a towering achievement, another awards season contender will likely come along for her in due course.
“I remember when I first came to Hollywood, it was a dream come true — until I got here. Because look at this face. I came here and was told: ‘You’re a minority,’” she said, recalling how people were even surprised she spoke English. She remembered joking with them: “‘Yeah, the flight here was 13 hours long, so I learned.’”
But still, it took her this long, at age 60, to get a role that fully encapsulates all her talents. As Evelyn Wang in the genre-bending multiverse film “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” she got to do everything from action to sci-fi, adventure, film noir, comedy and drama — all at once. It has clearly meant a lot to her.
These landmark moments for representation come with a mixed bag of emotions: celebrating the wins but also wondering why they took so damn long. There are reasons to feel optimistic but also cynical. It says a lot about the state of the industry that an icon like Yeoh was, for much of awards season, an underdog in the Best Actress race. Or that it was hard to believe “Everything Everywhere All At Once” had really become the Best Picture frontrunner because the history of the Oscars suggests otherwise.
This content was originally published here.
