 | ![]() | | Please clap! Photo: Doug Peters - PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images | | |  Last Sunday, the Daniels’ film Everything Everywhere All at Once swept the Oscars, scooping up seven awards including Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture. You’ve been bludgeoned with this already, but let me bring the hammer down one more time: The movie’s wins — at the box office, at the awards shows — are being hailed as milestones for Asian American cinema. Congratulations to co-director Daniel Scheinert. |
| Things are looking cute for any other Asian American filmmaker shopping a project in this hyperactive, logic-optional family-drama vein. Where things are looking less cute is on social media. There were, of course, outraged tweets that Jamie Lee Curtis won for Best Supporting over Stephanie Hsu (and Angela Bassett). But the toxic standom really jumped out when L.A. Times critic Justin Chang dared to publish a (well-written, reasonable) reaction to the Best Picture win, arguing that the movie checks all the boxes for what Hollywood Likes to See: “Had they singularly disproved the theory that Hollywood originality is dead, or had they inadvertently confirmed it by making a derivative Marvel-adjacent superhero movie in indie drag?” |
| You know where this is going. “EEAAO came on the heels of extreme Asian hate during covid … For you to dismiss others’ wins, tear down the communities that bring you up, and be blind to the state of the world. Really sad, man,” tweeted one person. “this (tbh homophobic!) take misses so much of what the film is and does, especially when it comes to queerness,” wrote another. |
| With Asian American Twitter displaying these kinds of symptoms, I had no choice but to recruit film critic Alison Willmore and writer E. Alex Jung for an emergency consult. We agreed: The patient is not well. “The simultaneous convos about Michelle Yeoh being a huge star internationally who doesn’t actually need Hollywood and also being a smol bean,” said Alison, “are good examples of how broken our brains have gotten in terms of trying to square power hierarchies over all these different vectors.” |
| And in case you’re wondering what I thought of the film … 7/10. But I cried! |
| | — Madeline Leung Coleman |
| Madeline Leung Coleman: Hey, guys. |
| E. Alex Jung: The meeting of Asian American grouches. |
| Madeline: Alison, what have you been seeing, and why do you think it started to get worse? |
| Alison Willmore: Well, I will say first that I like EEAAO. It was not, like, one of my top-ten favorite movies of the year, but it moved me and I think it’s a good Oscar winner. The Oscars are a measure of how the industry wants to see itself, and I think it is always important to remember that. |
| Alex: By that metric, you could have done a lot worse. |
| Alison: Yeah. As is often the case with movies that represent milestones, we hang all of these things on their success. I’ve seen people online being like, “You know, it’s so important right now, especially at a time when there’s increasing anti-Asian sentiment …” EEAAO winning Best Picture is not going to eradicate anti-Asian hate crimes. If we have learned one thing, it’s that people can very happily like your movie, like your music, and like your art and still have no problem being bigoted against a larger group. So that argument in particular makes me feel unhinged. |
| Alex: You also saw on the Oscar trail how everybody was sort of trying to fit the movie and their own careers within an easily digestible narrative around recognition and representation that felt a little too ready-made for me. And maybe false at times. |
| Madeline: Let’s get an example. |
| Alex: I mean, Michelle Yeoh slotting herself within the optics of Asian American identity. It’s a little weird, right? She’s a Hong Kong superstar and incredibly famous, and there was one way in which you could actually see the Oscars giving her this Best Actress Award as a recognition of a career that they’ve long ignored. Like it’s actually shameful that this is her first Oscar nomination — she’s fantastic in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — but she has to be grateful rather than indignant. |
| Alison: Right, and when she was coming up in Hong Kong cinema, she was not short on seeing people like her onscreen the way the little boys and little girls she addressed in that speech have been. There’s a little muddying the waters of Asianness and Asian Americanness. EEAAO is an Asian American movie. There’s a reason that, say, team Parasite was not wielding the same kind of narrative, because I think it was understood that would not be appropriate. |
| Alex: Bong Joon-ho negged the Academy into giving him Best Picture: the Oscars are local. Whereas this one felt very much about, like, gratitude. “Thank you so much for the recognition!” There’s something demeaning about it. This is an industry that has systematically shut you out or put you in secondary or racist roles for decades. And to have to be so grateful — it hurts my heart. |
| Alison: Ke Huy Quan has had the most poignant and compelling Oscar narrative. For me, as a half-Chinese child of the ’80s, he really was one of the only Asian kids I can remember seeing in American movies. At the same time, when he’s up there tearing up and thanking the Academy for, like, welcoming him back, I did have a moment of, like, Yeah, but who kicked you out in the first place? Who didn’t have a place for you? |
| Alex: Yeah, like, they couldn’t imagine you as something beyond just a cute kid. When you hit puberty, they were like, “Well, we don’t know what to do with you.” |
| Alison: It is certainly not our right to demand anger from him. His journey is his journey. But I think, watching that ceremony, I felt very aware of the fact that gratitude is something Hollywood is much more comfortable with than anger. I joked that this felt like the model-minority Oscars. The ceremony celebrated this movie and these major Asian American milestones, while also continually making jokes about the slap from last year — it did feel like it was setting out this path of This is how you can have a place here. You know with gratitude and, like, thanking your mom and saluting the American Dream and all of the hard work and sacrifices that were made for you. That is the right way to be let in the door. |
| Madeline: I crave an Asian slap … |
| Alex: To piggyback off of that, all of the criticism of Angela Bassett for not being quote-unquote gracious when she didn’t win Best Supporting Actress is absolutely ludicrous — the expectation of some sort of demeaning servitude. Like, you should comport yourself with eternal graciousness and gratitude for an industry that is horrid, actually. |
| Alison: You’re not allowed to feel that you deserve something or that you were denied something. You’re supposed to say, “It was an honor to be nominated.” The director of Till, Chinonye Chukwu, had really strong words when her film was shut out. In the trades, you would see comments, both anonymous and not, of people just being like, “Who do you think you are, saying this stuff out loud?” |
| Madeline: Back to EEAAO: Some people on Twitter were attacking critics by saying that if you didn’t like the movie, you were homophobic. Some claimed the movie had a “queer sensibility.” What is the argument being made there? |
| Alex: The main one is identitarian. The daughter played by Stephanie Hsu is queer, therefore it’s a queer film. But I think there’s a bad aesthetic argument that because it’s a maximalist film, it is queer — which I find odd and untrue, especially because there’s an arguably homophobic scene sandwiched right in the middle of the movie. Obviously, I’m talking about the butt-plug fighting scene. Personally, that is the discourse I would like to see: why the Daniels are so obsessed with their rectums. |
| Alison: There’s a short that they made that feels like a precursor to the sensibility of EEAAO called Interesting Ball. One of the storylines involves one of the Daniels going to prank the other one by shoving his butt in his face, then that guy gets stuck and then slowly gets pulled in. Daniel Scheinert slowly gets absorbed up Daniel Kwan’s asshole. |
| Alex: Honestly, that is queer to me. |
| Alison: Okay, but one of the other threads in this ten-minute movie is a bunch of frat guys struggling over whether they are allowed to show emotions. The Daniels, their sensibility is — as far as we know — that of two straight guys wrestling with the idea and the constraints of straight masculinity. Which is its own thing, I think. But if you’re going to say that straight men wrestling with the ability to show emotions is innately queer … |
| Madeline: So what’s the final verdict? Is it anti-Asian — or homophobic — to not love EEAAO? |
| Alex: The movie activated our filial piety. |
| Alison: People should be allowed to have whatever relationship they want to it. |
| Alex: We could get to the point where you could, maybe, start disagreeing. Be a disagreeable Asian person. |
| Alison: That’s the representation that I want to see. |
| Want to read more of our reviews, critical essays, and debates? Subscribe now for unlimited access to everything New York. |
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