A black superhero action flick. A film about an indigenous maid in Mexico. A portrayal of a gay, immigrant rock star. Spike Lee’s first Oscar.
This year’s Oscars were a win for films telling stories from a range of racial and cultural perspectives, marking a major shift three years after the movie industry’s top awards show was slammed for overlooking work by nonwhite artists.
Green Book, a film about racial injustice in the segregated US South in the 1960s, took best picture, the night’s top prize. In his acceptance speech, director Peter Farrelly said the film, about a black pianist and his white driver, was “about loving each other despite our differences.”
Photo: AFP
Green Book won three awards, as did Roma, a black-and-white, Spanish-language film about an indigenous housemaid, and Black Panther, a Marvel superhero movie with an almost entirely black cast. Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, about a black detective who goes undercover with the Ku Klux Klan, also was honored.
“It’s a real breakthrough that any film about race gets to win,” Kevin Willmott, who is African-American and was one of the BlacKkKlansman writers who won an Oscar for the screenplay, said backstage.
“When I first started in the industry, it was really bad. And we’ve come a long way since then.”
Mahershala Ali, one of the stars of Green Book, was one of two black actors to claim acting prizes, taking home the best supporting actor trophy. Regina King, who played a protective mother in If Beale Street Could Talk, claimed the supporting actress award.
Rami Malek, whose parents immigrated from Egypt to the US, took home the best actor prize for his turn as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. He noted backstage that as a child he felt skeptical about his prospects in Hollywood because of his cultural background.
“I never saw anyone in a lead role that looked like me,” he said.
Spike Lee, the acclaimed black director, took home his first Oscar on Sunday, a best adapted screenplay prize for BlacKkKlansman, after a career that has spanned decades and included a famous Oscar loss in 1989 for his film Do The Right Thing.
Backstage, Lee sipped champagne and said he would not have won an Oscar on Sunday had it not been for the #OscarSoWhite campaign that erupted in 2015 and 2016, and for Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the former Academy president who oversaw efforts to diversify its membership.
“They opened up the Academy to make the Academy look more like America,” Lee said, noting wins on Sunday by black women including Ruth E. Carter and Hannah Beachler, the costume designer and production designer, respectively, for Black Panther.
Mexico’s Alfonso Cuaron, who won the directing, cinematography and foreign film prizes for his film Roma, thanked the Academy in his speech for recognizing a film with a lead character “that has historically been relegated to the background of cinema.”
Backstage, however, he noted that Hispanic Americans are “really badly represented still” in film roles.
Also backstage, King noted the broad support she received for her performance, but said of Hollywood that “we’re still trying to get more reflective. Still trying to get there.”
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and