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Kai Wright: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Kai Wright, host of The United States of Anxiety from WNYC. I'm in for Tanzina Vega until she's back later this week. Good to be with you. This morning, the Oscar nominations were announced and some of them were particularly notable. The late great Chadwick Boseman was nominated for Best Actor for his final performance in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

Nomadland director Chloé Zhao became the first Asian woman and first woman of color, period, if you can believe that, ever to be nominated for Best Director, and Promising Young Woman's Emerald Fennell was also nominated for Best Director making this the first time that two women will ever compete in the same year in that category. Also, the movie Minari directed by Lee Isaac Chung received a bevy of nominations including for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Director. It's a long list.

The film follows a Korean family who move from California to Arkansas where the father played by Steven Yeun, struggles to fulfill his dream of starting a farm. Yeun and Youn Yuh-jung who plays his character's mother-in-law, were both nominated for their performances as well, but their nomination stand in contrast to a long history of Asian and Asian-American actors getting overlooked for awards in the US even when the films they star in get recognition in more technical categories.

Shirley Li is a staff writer covering culture for The Atlantic, and she explored this trend in her recent piece. Shirley, thanks for being here.

Shirley: Hi, Kai, thank you for having me.

Kai Wright: Also with us is Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown and a television writer for shows including Westworld and Legion. Charles, it's great to have you as well.

Charles: Thank you, Kai. Great to be here.

Kai Wright: Shirley, before we get into some of the bigger issues you raised in your piece, let's talk about these nominations Minari received this morning. Did any of them come as a surprise to you?

Shirley: No, I'm just thrilled that Steven Yeun and Youn Yuh-jung have been nominated. I think those two were the frontrunners out of the cast. I was a little disappointed that Ye-ri Han didn't get anything, but I'm just thrilled. [chuckles]

Kai Wright: All right. You mentioned Ye-ri Han, she plays the mother, Monica, in Minari. You've written that she hasn't gotten as much recognition as some other co-stars. Why do you think that is?

Shirley: Well, I'm going to toss this one over to the writer, director Lee Isaac Chung who I interviewed for this piece. He talked about her performance being relatively invisible. I think part of the invisibility comes from the way that her character is so nuanced and doesn't quite fit into a prescribed box or a trope that Hollywood tends to prefer when rewarding even rarely Asian actors and Asian performances.

She plays the mother of the family. She is playing a relatively quiet role, but she's also the character who is trying very hard not to express her hurt and her anxiety, and her pain. Often, when we talk about these award-winning roles or award-worthy performances, we think about those outsize dramatic performances. She's very careful not to show any emotion. Yet, her performance is all about that anxiety, it is humming with it. It is a really raw real performance, but it is hard to understand. [chuckles]

Kai Wright: She stole the show for me, I'll be honest. Charles, what about those boxes that Shirley is talking about? Hollywood likes to put people in these boxes that they can understand. Do you think any of the Minari characters fit neatly into the boxes that non-Asian viewers like to put people in?

Charles: Yes, Kai. I felt Shirley's piece really nailed it for me on a number of points. That was really such an insight for me, what she said about it's almost like her performance is designed to be overlooked, that is the point of it. She's not doing things that are flashy, but for me watching her and watching Steven Yeun's performance, it was almost like they had an emotional vocabulary that I understood intuitively just watching it.

Maybe it takes people time to realize when you're watching a performance like this or the performer as an individual to learn that vocabulary, not in a didactic sense but in a sense of, "Oh, this is what this person is embodying." I notice a certain pattern of gestures or I know what acting looks like, but this is something else that's going on here. Still acting, of course, but maybe a style or with moves that we haven't necessarily seen before.

Kai Wright: What about Youn Yuh-jung? What do you guys think about her performance? What do you think stood out for her, Shirley?

Shirley: I absolutely adored her performance. I also spoke with her for the piece. [chuckles] She is considered one of the greatest actors in South Korea. For her, even speaking of American awards, she didn't really know what they meant. [chuckles] Her performance also comes from a deeply personal space. She told me that she had thought about her own interactions with her great-grandmother in order to live inside her character's head. Her grandmother is not the typical American grandmother, which is what the little boy in the film thinks that his grandmother is going to be.

She's witty. She's acerbic. She doesn't punish him for the pranks he pulls. She's always encouraging him to [chuckles] run, to do things that he's been told that he cannot do. There's this humanity to her performance that also comes, as I said, from her own history, from her own experiences. I touch on this in the piece. Often, these performances get confused for recordings when they are still performances in and of themselves. For me, her performance stood out because you could easily see her as the comic relief of the film. She is funny. Her character is funny.

Yuh-jung was telling me that after the screenings people would tell her, "You're so funny." That there is a heart and a humanity to this role that goes deeper than just saying some funny lines. It's just easy to call her funny.

Kai Wright: Charles, let's talk for a second about the Golden Globes because they have gotten a lot of criticisms in the past two years for nominating Minari and then The Farewell both in the Best Foreign Language Film category, although both films were made by Asian-American directors. What do you think that tells us about how films made by Asian-Americans are viewed by people who are not Asian?

Charles: It's a good question, Kai. On the one hand, it has a perpetuating effect to continue this idea of here are stories that are interesting, but they belong in this category. They don't belong in the mainstream category. On the other hand, I think it's worth noting that we're talking about it. It was a controversy for a reason, which I think is that people recognized that this is an issue. I think it's also worth noting that there's been a lot of progress. The film Minari got made with Plan B and A24.

It's not as if the doors are completely closed. It got all the way to the point where people could have a controversy. Not to settle for anything but I think it's an ongoing conversation, which gives me some hope.

Kai Wright: All right. Shirley, in your article about Asian-American actors being overlooked, you have a long list of films that were nominated for Oscars in certain categories but not for acting. What are some of the most notable examples to you?

Shirley: Oh man, there are so many. [chuckles] Just looking at Best Picture winners in the past, Slumdog Millionaire, The Last Emperor, which is about the last emperor of China. These were films that were nominated across the board for many, many categories but none for acting. Last year's Parasite fits in this category, Life of Pie, Memoirs of a Geisha. [chuckles]

I think I wrote this piece because when I had talked to another film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, when I talked to the actor, Michelle Yeoh, she was telling me that it did hurt for her acting and her peers' acting in the film not to be considered even though the movie was nominated and up for all these other things including Best Picture and Best Director.

Yes, there are many, many films that fall under this category. Charles makes a great point. There's reason for hope, but it is unfortunate to be in this place where every "win" or step forward for the community, it also comes with a certain feeling of a bummer I think as Steven Yeun had put it a while back. [chuckles] Just this feeling that "Oh, it took this long." That's the unfortunate side of all this.

Kai Wright: You've also written that you feel like when Asian actors are nominated, it's when they've got a white savior character alongside them. What do you mean by that?

Shirley: Oh, yes. This goes into what one of the academics I spoke to called the "veneer of authenticity" that's placed on films about Asian characters. There's a tendency to see them fitting in certain tropes and only rewarding them when they act out certain tropes, which is something that I believe Charles' book goes into, as well. [chuckles] When I write about this, I'm looking at the way that some Asian performers, when they've been nominated for Oscars in the past, they've only been nominated for fitting inside these boxes that we've been talking about.

For instance, Dev Patel, he wasn't nominated for Slumdog Millionaire, where he plays the hero. The film also has a lot of Bollywood influences. He's not nominated for that performance, however, he's nominated for playing an Australian-Indian adoptee in the film Lion, which some critics saw as a white savior tale, as you said. He's not the hero, here. He's the one who's being saved by a white family.

Kai Wright: Charles, Shirley mentioned your book, Interior Chinatown, where you talk about some of this pigeonholing. You feel like there's been some progress, you were saying before the break. Has there been progress in moving away from these kinds of roles in recent years, you think?

Charles: I think there's been some. I think we're already seeing it, and it's exciting to see Asians and Asian-Americans both behind and in front of the camera, not just stuck in what we're traditionally-- the few roles that were allowed for Asians on-screen. I think we're somewhere between, "If the door was closed before," and for like a white star, it'd be like, "The door's open, and here's your chair." We're somewhere like, "The door's open, but bring your own chair." [laughs] "We're not going to seat you, but come on in."

Kai Wright: Maybe we got a better chair, anyway. What do you think about these awards, in general, Charles? Does this matter? Shirley was saying that you talked to Michelle Yeoh, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. She felt like she was hurt by not being nominated. What do you think? Do these words really matter?

Charles: I think they do. I think they certainly matter to the individuals, and that's important to remember that for each performance that's not in the vacuum, as Shirley was pointing out. There are cultural and other factors going into it, but I think they also matter to people watching, both Asian-American or non-Asian-American, in terms of a level of acceptance or a validation. To me, they matter a great deal. I don't know if that was for Shirley or for me.

Kai Wright: It was for you, but Shirley, you can answer, too. What do you think?

Shirley: No, I agree. I think it's really easy to look down on awards and say, "Oh, the categorization, and there are controversies everywhere," but on an individual level, they do matter. For the average theater-goer or movie-goer, I think they-- Marketing tends to use nominations and awards as part of a movie's appeal and I think this just means a greater reach for films like Minari.

Kai Wright: We got about a minute left. Thinking about representation in this moment, it is a time when we're talking about violence against Asian-Americans spiking. How do you think these kinds of portrayals matter to the broader culture in that way? Start with you, Charles.

Charles: I think they really helped to normalize Asian faces on-screen, in stories that have to do with a whole range of things, not just cultural heritage stories. I think they go a long way to getting into people's psyches, that these are American stories.

Kai Wright: Shirley, in 10 seconds, what do you think?

Shirley: Oh, I agree. I think the real world and Hollywood, you can't really separate them on this level. Stereotypes that are perpetuated on-screen are perpetuated in real life. To be able to see these stories normalize, as Charles said, it's important.

Kai Wright: Shirley Li is a staff writer covering culture for The Atlantic and Charles Yu is the author of Interior Chinatown and a television writer for shows including Westworld and Legion. Great talking to both of you.

Shirley: Thank you, Kai.

Charles: Thank you Kai.

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