Michelle Yeoh shared an article highlighting systemic racism at the Oscars
Yeoh deleted her post later, but the article also argued that Yeoh deserves Best Actress over Cate Blanchett
Aux News Michelle Yeoh
With the Academy Awards coming up this Sunday, it really seems like Everything Everywhere All At Once’s show to lose. The Daniels’ film went on a huge run at the guild awards earlier this year, winning big WGA, SAG, DGA, and PGA awards, effectively guaranteeing it a Best Picture win at the Oscars, to say nothing of the acting categories. But don’t just take it from the show biz community that Everything Everywhere deserves to win some awards, take it from one of the people who stands a very good chance of taking one of those awards home: Michelle Yeoh.
In a since-deleted post on Instagram (we’ll get to that in a minute), Yeoh shared an article from Radhika Seth in Vogue about how it’s been over 20 years since Halle Berry became the first woman of color to win Best Actress at the Oscars—and nobody, until maybe this year, has done it since. Yeoh quoted her own SAG Awards speech in the post, saying, “This is not just for me, this is for every little girl that looks like me,” and “We want to be seen, we want to be heard.”
Now, actors campaigning for Oscars is nothing new (especially this year), but what makes Yeoh’s post noteworthy is that she’s not necessarily saying “vote for me,” which might rub people the wrong way (again: especially this year). She’s highlighting someone else’s argument that it would be Good and Important if she won in the face of a century of systematic racism from the Academy, and it deserves to be noted that it’s truly outrageous that Yeoh would be the first Asian woman ever to win Best Actress and only the second person of color to ever take home that trophy. (The Vogue piece also goes into the interesting history of women of color going for Supporting Actress rather than the lead, even when white women who are pretty clearly in supporting roles go for Best Actress.)
Still, a lot of readers looked past that whole part of the post and focused on the fact that the Vogue article (and therefore Yeoh’s screenshots of the article) included a mention of the counterargument against Yeoh winning—namely that Cate Blanchett’s performance in TÁR is incredible and that she also has a lot of awards momentum. Ultimately, though, the argument from Vogue is that Yeoh winning would be “both supremely well deserved and infinitely more meaningful” than a win for Blanchett, and it seems like Yeoh agrees since she included it.
But the post has since been deleted, and Yeoh is probably the only one who knows why. It could be because people were mad that the story she referenced talked about Blanchett, or it could be that simply acknowledging a fellow Best Actress nominee like that may have been in violation of the Oscars’ rules about campaigning. Either way it’s probably irrelevant now: The post was deleted, so who cares, but also it would be an ungodly terrible look for the Oscars to reprimand Yeoh now, so they probably won’t.
28 Comments
I wonder if Michelle Yeoh posted it or if she had a social media team that did it who then may or may not have been told to take it down because it can have the reverse effect. I agree, it should just be the performance but it can be easier said than done to avoid factoring more than just the performance both for and against someone.
What does it matter?I imagine the voting, such as it is, is long done.
While not a fan of the tactic “Vote for me to prove you are not racist”, its a good card to play especially in Hollywood. Could work, just has to turn on more then it turns off.
Asians dont deserve no Oscar. I bet Yeoh’s great grand daddy wasnt even a slave!
lmao so funny which celebs get the soft touch treatment from AV club. Michelle Yeoh comes across as unbelievably arrogant and full of herself every time she opens her mouth!
She comes off that way to you. Your feelings aren’t facts.
And that makes her different from any other actor? At least she has a resume to back her up.
People have different opinions that you?That is SO WEIRD!!!!
Awwww, poor snowflake.
Look, just because she wasn’t in one of your Bond movies…
so fucking what? we like her, don’t like you.
It’s been wild watching this movie’s real time journey from “scrappy indie underdog” to “unstoppable award juggernaut that racists want to take down a peg.”
Dats super rayciss. Asians have it good in America. Everyone knows blacks deserve the Oscars.
My mom says racists have small peepees.
Bitch sounds like she take a lot of ape cock
EEAAO is a beautiful dramatic story about a mother and daughter, a daughter and father, a husband and wife wrapped up in a multiverse action comedy (which the cast did their own stunts)TAR is your run of the mill sexual-psycho drama. I’m not knocking Cate’s performance, but we’ve seen variations of this story before.
Sigh. A disparate outcome is not proof of “systemic” racism, no matter what Ibram X. Kendi says. You actually have to *prove* that racism has occurred. Again: a disparate outcome is proof is a disparate outcome, period. I’m looking at you…everyone on the left.
imagine being the guy who tries to deny racism exists. get a hobby.
I love Michelle Yeoh since I first saw her some 30 years ago. I loved EEAAO, saw it 3 times. Maybe my favorite movie last year. I appreciate that a woman of color winning an Oscar is a big deal and sets a good and necessary precedent. But I find this weird narrative that Yeoh is somehow an underdog finally getting long overdue recognition to be utterly baffling. She’s been in movies and tv for decades, she’s a bona fide star worldwide, she has a net worth of 40 million dollars. How is this some champion of the underclass story?
..because of all the racism.
It’s not entirely about Yeoh, but more about POC and Asian actors being consistently snubbed in favor of a consistently white roster. Depending on how much stock you put in awards (and even people who don’t put any must surely recognize that it’s quite nice to be acknowledged as being the “best” at something), it can range from annoying to insulting that this happens year after year. Even putting Yeoh aside for a moment, a very select few have had the sort of career James Hong has, but he doesn’t have a list of awards anywhere near commensurate with his CV. It’s actually not entirely uncommon for people to think that Asians are bad actors in general, and I’ve seen people say the same about a number of different ethnicities.
When it comes down to it, these awards are just like any other campaign. A certain amount of merit is often involved, and the rest comes down to popularity, name recognition, and marketing. Yeoh is pretty popular and has some good name recognition, but she loses both to Blanchett easily. Considering the lax attitude a lot of academy voters take in regards to research, it’s incredibly easy to imagine how Blanchett walks away with the award this year without the incredible groundswell of support fans of EEAAO have given the movie and its crew since it came out. In that, it sort of mirrors Parasite, which had a general campaign of “You’d have to be a fucking idiot to vote for any other movie for Best Picture this year” from its fans (and creator, even). And they were right; 2019 was a pretty good year for movies, but it was clearly the best of the bunch. And it certainly would have lost to something like The Irishman if nobody talked about it.
Don’t get me wrong, being a working actor is great, and nothing against James Hong, but he’s a “where do I know him from” character actor who does mostly bit parts and guest spots, like “ohhh it’s the martial arts trainer from Friends,” or “it’s the sweatshop owner from Law and Order SVU,” or “oh it’s Cassandra’s father who has the kung-fu fight with Mike Myers in Wayne’s World 2.” Acting isn’t like YouTube where they mail you plaques when you hit a certain number of roles.
She’s never had top billing in Hollywood. She was a huge star in Hong Kong (though she never won any awards there, either, to my knowledge). Tomorrow Never Dies should have been her fast-track to global stardom but she still faced racism by people who assumed she spoke poor English or who wanted to pigeonhole her. She’s now at an age where she’s starting to get auntie roles or mentor roles like in Shang-Chi and Gunpowder Milkshake. This film gave her not just a chance to be an action lead again, but to flex comedy and dramatic chops.She gave an amazing freaking performance in EEAAO. But part of the storyline is also that she was snubbed for CTHD and Hollywood can atone for that now. And Cate Blanchett has a full shelf of awards for all these other things. It’s a bit like how The Departed deserved its Oscar, but so did Scorsese’s filmography.
This is much more cringe than Riseborough.
My mom got so jealous when I said Yeoh is pretty. My mom doesn’t like competition.
I don’t think it’s over the line to point out that Asian actors have been all but ignored by the Academy. And the throughline of many award speeches related to this film, most notably the ensemble SAG honor, is that there are millions of men and women, boys and girls who haven’t seen themselves reflected up there onstage at the Oscars. Crouching Tiger and Parasite are two Asian movies the Academy loved but none of its performances were nominated (I maintain to this day that Song Kang-ho got ripped off by the Academy for his work in the latter). So I think Yeoh was coming from the right place.I think this flap and the Andrea Riseborough debacle shine a light on rules AMPAS must revisit after the ceremony.