In addition to the recognition of Michelle Yeoh for Best Leading Actress, the Vietnamese Ke Huy Quan also received the Academy Award for the same film, Everything Everywhere All at Once. India won two statuettes for best original song and best documentary short.
Los Angeles () – Asia won four Oscars last night at the 95th Academy Awards. Michelle Yeoh, a 60-year-old Malaysian actress of Chinese descent, is the first Asian woman to win the best leading actress statuette with “Everything Everywhere All at Once“. This sci-fi film tells the story of a Chinese immigrant who owns a laundromat struggling to make ends meet. In the same production, lead Evelyn Wang’s husband Waymond is played by Ke Huy Quan, a Vietnamese actor who first took refuge in Hong Kong and then settled in the United States, and won the best supporting actor award.
India took two statuettes. One for Best Original Song, with “Naatu Naatu“, composed for the Telugu film “RRR”, which beat out songs performed by stars such as Rihanna and Lady Gaga. The other, for best documentary short for “The Elephant Whisperers“, which tells the story of a tribal couple who care for an orphaned elephant.
Yeoh was born in the city of Ipoh, capital of the Malaysian state of Perak; As a young woman, she won prizes in various beauty pageants and was a dancer for years. She rose to fame acting in several Hong Kong films alongside Jackie Chan (she didn’t learn Cantonese until later) before landing in international theaters thanks to “Tomorrow Never Dies” – in which she played the first “Bond girl” of Asia- and “The Tiger and the Dragon”. At one point in her acceptance speech, she said, “Ladies, don’t let anyone tell you that you’ve exceeded your limits,” a phrase from two Malaysian ministers, Hannah Yeoh and Nancy Shukri, who attended a special screening event of the ceremony. of the Oscars in Kuala Lumpur and attended by friends and family of the actress. Wee Ka Siong, president of the Chinese Association of Malaysia – a political party to which the actress’s father also belonged – also congratulated her fellow citizen.
In his acceptance speech, Ke Huy Quan recalled that he was “one who had escaped in a boat.” Born in Saigon (South Vietnam) in 1978, at just seven years old, he left Vietnam with his father for Hong Kong, while his mother and three other siblings went to Malaysia. The family was reunited in the United States a year later: “My journey started on a boat, I spent a year in a refugee camp and ended up here, on the biggest stage in Hollywood. They say stories like this only happen in movies, but these are true stories, this is the true American dream,” Quan said. He began his career as a child starring in the movie “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” alongside Harrison Ford, who was in charge of presenting him with the statuette. The former refugee had long given up acting to work mostly as an assistant director, but inspired by the success of “Crazy Rich Asians“, a 2018 film, said she had wanted to give acting one last chance at her almost 50 years of age.
“Naatu Naatu” (which means “dance, dance”) is the first song from an Indian film to win an Oscar, after it already made history by winning a Golden Globe in January this year. “RRR”, the film where it was you can hear and one of the most expensive in Bollywood history, tells the story of two heroes (little by little deified) who fight (sometimes very violently) for the independence of India in 1920.
“The Elephant Whisperers“, for its part, is also the first Indian documentary to win an award. The film tells the story of Bomman and Bellie, a tribal couple from the Kattunayakan community, who care for an orphaned baby elephant. The film was shot in the picturesque directed by director Kartiki Gonsalves, explores the bond that forms between humans and animals even after Raghu the baby elephant is separated from the tribals by local authorities and handed over to another caretaker For generations, the indigenous Kattunayakan people have dedicated themselves to protecting the forests of the state of Tamil Nadu.
