Taipei, Taiwan — The Oscar Sweep, who made the history of Chloe Zhao, won the Best Director and Best Picture Awards, but faces a modest reaction and even censorship in her place of birth.
Zhao’s “Nomadland” is the second film directed by a woman to win the Oscar Prize for Best Picture. She is the first woman of color and the second woman to win an Academy Award for Best Directing.
Still, in China, where Zhao was born, her history-making success has not been overwhelmed or celebrated. Chinese state media remained silent as of Monday afternoon, with no mention of her victory over CCTV and two major state-owned outlets, the Xinhua.
Instead, there was even censorship. A post announcing Zhao’s victory by the movie magazine Watch Movies, which has more than 14 million followers on the ubiquitous Weibo microblog, was censored hours after its appearance on Monday morning. The hashtag “Chloe Zhao won the Best Director Award” was also censored on the platform and the user received the error message “Page not found according to relevant laws, regulations and policies”.
Some users use “zt” to post about Zhao and use her full name initials, Zhou Ting, in Chinese. When I entered Zhou’s name in Chinese on Weibo, only irrelevant posts were displayed from the beginning of April. A search for “Oscar” showed only official posts from Korean and US embassies.
Douban, a popular movie fan, banned searches for “Nomadland” and “Zhao Ting,” and said that “search results could not be displayed due to related laws and regulations.” Several discussion threads about Zhao’s victory have also been removed from the app. News articles from WeChat, the nation’s largest messaging app, have also been removed.
Still, the news of her victory spread to the Chinese internet, with individual web users and bloggers cheering for Zhao. Many paid attention to her acceptance speech. Zhao quoted a passage from a poem written in the 13th century that he remembered as a child, like many other Chinese children.
In contrast, South Korean Youn Yuh Jung, who won the audience to play her grandmother in “Minari,” could be searched on the Chinese Internet. Young won the Best Supporting Actress Award and became the first Oscar-winning Korean performer.
And in Yun’s hometown of South Korea, “actor Yoon Yu-jung” topped Twitter’s trend list, and other Korean celebrities immediately congratulated him. Lee Byung-hun, a Korean actor known overseas as “Storm Shadow” in the “GI Joe” series, posted a photo of Yong holding an Oscar trophy. “Impossible is just an opinion,” he wrote in a post. The acclaimed Netflix series “Kingdom” Bae Doona and South Korean actress Kim Hye Soo also congratulated Yong on their social media accounts.
Zhao faced a backlash from Golden Globe Award-winning nationalists in March, and some Chinese internet users wondered if she was called a Chinese and insulted her country with comments about the political system. .. Chinese media, television and social media are tightly controlled by the ruling Communist Party, either directly or through self-censorship, and online criticism can often demand boycotts of entertainers and well-known brands.
According to local media, the film was scheduled to be released in China on April 23, prior to the March backlash, but wasn’t released last week and there was no official announcement about the release. Employees of two Beijing cinemas said they were unaware of future screenings of the film.
But offline, some congratulated Zhao on his victory.
Zhou Lu, 35, who worked for a publishing company in Beijing, said: She said she hadn’t heard of Zhao before, but she plans to watch a movie.
Others have pointed out that nationalism should not put a place in the discussion about cinema.
“Her victory is natural, and it has nothing to do with her country or her ethnicity,” said Victory Dong, a 19-year-old college student who uses Douban.
However, Dong didn’t feel any special connection with Zhao just because of his birthplace. “She is a global citizen, but I am not.”
By Huizhong Wu