Although this year’s best-actress Oscar race has been both unpredictable and controversial, front-runner Michelle Yeoh doesn’t believe anything out of the ordinary has occurred. In an interview with the BBC’s Today, the Everything Everywhere All at Once star commented on the controversy surrounding her fellow best-actress nominee Andrea Riseborough’s unconventional To Leslie campaign.
“The Academy has always prided itself on having regulations and playing by the rules, and if [cheating them] was so easy, it would have been done before,” said Yeoh. “We are always evolving on how to protect our integrity, and I have great faith we will continue to do that.”
Riseborough burst into the best-actress Oscar conversation—and ultimately got a nomination—thanks to a last-minute, unconventional, and highly calculated campaign for her work in the heretofore little-seen indie To Leslie, a film that grossed $27,000 at the box office. The grassroots, word-of-mouth campaign for a “small film with a giant heart” saw A-list actors including Kate Winslet, Demi Moore, and Edward Norton championing Riseborough’s performance on social media during the week of Oscar voting. Riseborough’s campaign proved successful, nabbing her a surprise best-actress slot—alongside Yeoh, Cate Blanchett, Ana de Armas, and Michelle Williams—and leading to the notable snubs of supposed locks like The Woman King’s Viola Davis and Till’s Danielle Deadwyler. Following the snubs, Till director Chinonye Chukwu called out Hollywood for its “unabashed misogyny towards Black women.”
As a result of the To Leslie controversy, the Academy conducted a formal review of nominees’ campaign procedures and ultimately decided not to rescind Riseborough’s nomination, though it noted that it discovered “social media and outreach campaigning tactics that caused concern.” The Academy is reportedly considering “whether changes to the guidelines may be needed in a new era of social media and digital communication.”
“I love [Davis and Deadwyler] to the extreme and wish we were all getting Oscars, but it’s tough. It took me 40 years to even get a nomination,” Yeoh said in the interview. Yeoh is the first self-identifying Asian woman to earn a nomination for best actress at the Academy Awards. (British Indian actor Merle Oberon hid her Asian ancestry when she was nominated for best actress in 1936.) “Every single actor and actress puts their heart and soul into these movies, and you don’t necessarily start thinking you are going to get nominated,” she continued. “The stories we want to tell are more important.”
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