Sandra Oh’s Globe honour echoes change in Hollywood
KOREAN-Canadian actress Sandra Oh’s success in winning the Best Actress award at the recent Golden Globes provided a thrilling moment for people of Asian descent, especially native Korean audiences.
Best known for her role Christina Yang in ABC drama series ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, Oh, whose Korean name is Oh Mi-ju, became the first Asian performer to win the Best Actress in a drama series for her lead role in ‘Killing Eve’. Including her previous win as Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes in 2006 with ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, she became the first Asian to win multiple Golden Globes.
Oh, who also became the first Asian to co-host the major US awards show, said, “I wanted to be here to look out on this audience and witness this moment of change. I am not fooling myself. Next year could be different. But right now this moment is real.”
In her emotional acceptance speech, Oh thanked her parents, Korean immigrants to Canada, who were in the crowd. “I’m so grateful to my family. I’d like to thank my mother and my father,” the 48-year-old actress said, followed by saying “Mom, Dad, I love you,” in Korean.
Oh, who plays an M16 agent and assassin hunter in the spy thriller, was previously nominated in the outstanding lead actress category at the Emmy Awards last fall, but didn’t take home any awards.
Local critics say Oh’s winning awards in Hollywood where Asian actors are such a minority is a great achievement. “In the US, for an Asian actress to win Best Actress is more difficult than, say, for a Latin actress. Oh’s win carries a symbolic meaning that Asian actors can rise from quota actors to lead actors,” said a movie critic Kang Yoo-jung.
Lee Taek-gwang, a culture critic and professor of global communication at Kyung Hee University, further said “Oh’s win is cultural counter reaction to Trump government’s populism leaning to white people.”
After decades of treating Asian actors as the quota Asians, casting for such stereotypical roles as quirky technicians or science nerds, and whitewashing Asian roles as in ‘Ghost in the Shell’ and ‘Aloha’, Hollywood has been going through great changes seeking more Asian representation and more cultural diversity on screens.
It was only last year that audiences started to see a particularly large number of productions about Asians gaining popularity, ranging from ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ to ‘Searching’ to ‘Kim’s Convenience’.
Romantic comedy ‘Crazy Rich Asians’, which topped the North America box office for three weeks last year, was the first Hollywood film with all AsianAmerican lead actors in 25 years, following ‘Joy Luck Club’ (1993). A thriller ‘Searching’, starring Korean-American actor John Cho as a father looking for his missing daughter, also became the first mainstream US film in that genre with an AsianAmerican lead.