I didn’t watch the Oscars last night cause setting the clock forward has apparently made me forget how to sleep. Thanks a lot, farmers.
However! After crashing at 7 pm then waking up from 2 am - 4 am, allegedly making myself 3 grilled cheese sandwiches during that time like a stoned teenager, I watched plenty of Oscar clips on Youtube, and I think, like a professional, I got something.
Joy.
I know the clickbait thing to do would be to write about Lady Gaga not wearing makeup (it was dope) or how a while back Roxanne Gay got mad at Brendan Frasier for being fat (or something) or how some news outlets referred to Michelle Yeoh as someone who, “Identifies as Asain” (Twitter is mad and I’m just confused) but instead, I want to talk about joy.
Go watch Ke Huy Quan win that Oscar. Then watch it again. Then tattoo that feeling onto your heart for every time you get sad.
Did you see the way he jumped for joy? How he thanked his wife with such honest love? How he ran to the stage to hug Harrison Ford with the same energy as when as a child he hugged Indy? Did you hear him afterward shout GOONIES NEVER DIE?!
How can anyone ever be sad again after this?!
This isn’t about Hollywood. This isn’t about, “Were the Oscars woke enough?” “Were they TOO woke?!” It’s about joy.
When I am feeling down on myself (last night) I want to write a piece tearing into the Oscars. I want to look at all of these shockingly hot privileged assholes who latch on to causes only to absolve them of their guilt for having a swimming pool. Actors who lecture regular people even though they forget what being regular even feels like.
I want to trash this gala of clueless plastics with abs I could only dream of. I want to mock them for sitting in their echo chamber of a circle jerk that cost enough money to feed all the homeless in Los Angeles. The ones they would have happily ran the red carpet over in order to get their stupid gold statues.
It’s easy to be cynical nowadays.
If you say something positive on Twitter and there are countless people there to remind you that SOMETHING IS BAD SOMEWHERE.
Say something negative and you are rewarded.
A lot of us spend every day dragging ourselves out of bed, getting metaphorically kicked in the stomach, then dragging ourselves back only to wake up at 2 am and panic cook many grilled cheese sandwiches. We don’t want to hear about rich people getting rewarded! We want everyone to struggle as we struggle.
But Ke Huy Quan. Man. This is it.
He only started acting again 3 years ago. He is 51. How many of us have put dreams back into storage at half his age?
He was afraid to tell members of his family he was acting again. He waited until after the trailer of his now Oscar-winning movie came out to make those phone calls. He didn’t have health insurance a few years ago.
He is us.
He has been laughed at. He used to go by the name Jonathan to sound less Asian. He went after dreams that people who loved him tried to mute for his own good.
He tried.
He tried again.
And then,
He won.
I want to use his bravery and more importantly his kindness as a roadmap for success.
There was no bitterness in his acceptance speech. No anger at the agents who couldn’t find him work. Just. Fucking. Joy.
We think we have to put joy on hold to succeed. We need to hustle and get ahead of everyone else. There will be time for happiness once I’m successful! But what if the climb was filled with joy? What if the struggle still could contain hope? What if when we get a victory instead of clutching it with shakey hands thinking about what’s next we just enjoy it for what it is?
A beautiful moment that no one can ever take away.
That was a really great speech he gave to inspire those to continue to persevere even after setbacks, and the Goonies reference has a bit more to it than you might realize. I love this bit of trivia about the movie and Ke Huy Quan (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6710474/trivia/):
During a March 2022 New York Magazine interview with Ke Huy Quan to promote his role in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Quan said that his entertainment lawyer is his Goonies co-star and fellow former child actor Jeff Cohen. Cohen, who played Lawrence "Chunk" Cohen alongside Quan's Richard "Data" Wang in the 1980s children's classic, graduated from UCLA's law school in 2000 and started the entertainment firm Cohen & Gardner in Beverly Hills. During a January 2023 Hollywood Reporter actors' roundtable, Quan said that it was Cohen who drew up his deal to appear in Everything Everywhere All at Once: "He's all grown now, he's an entertainment lawyer--he's my entertainment lawyer. So when the producer of our movie was trying to make my deal, he said, he would never have imagined that we would have to talk to Chunk to get Data to be in his movie. Yeah, it was just so sweet!"