Academy Awards are presented annually for outstanding achievements in filmmaking. Winners of an Academy Award receive a gold-plated statue commonly called an Oscar, shown here. Credit: © Richard Levine, Alamy Images

On Sunday, March 12, the 95th Academy Awards—commonly known as the Oscars—were held at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California. The Oscars celebrate the past year’s achievements in filmmaking. In 2023, late night talk show host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel hosted the show. A variety of celebrities introduced and handed out the awards.

Michelle Yeoh stars as a woman who suddenly develops the power to leap between parallel universes in the action-adventure-fantasy Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Credit: A24

Everything Everywhere All at Once swept the Oscars, picking up awards in 7 of its 11 nominated categories, the most of any film nominations this year. Among those was the most coveted Best Picture award going to the directing pair Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, affectionately called the Daniels, and Jonathan Wang. Best Film Editing went to Paul Rogers. The Daniels also share the Best Director and Best Original Screenplay trophies. Kwan became the second Asian director to win best picture, director, and screenplay at the Academy Awards. The first was Joon Ho for Parasite (2019).

The sci-fi, multiverse-traveling, action adventure truly covered everything and everywhere. Michelle Yeoh won Best Actress for her role as Evelyn Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once. The film beautifully portrayed the connection between Evelyn and her daughter Joy, and Joy’s powerful alter-ego Jobu Tupaki. Stephanie Hsu portrayed Joy and Jobu as they hopped realities. Ke Huy Quan won Best Supporting Actor as Waymond Wang, Evelyn’s goofy husband. Jamie Lee Curtis won Best Supporting Actress as the IRS auditor threatening to shut down the Wang’s laundromat.

Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win Best Actress. Quan made his return to acting after 30 years and became the second Asian actor to win Best Supporting Actor. As a child actor, he worked with legendary director Steven Spielberg on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and was cast by Spielberg for The Goonies (1985). This year, Spielberg became the first person nominated for Best Director in six different decades. Both with their first Oscars, Yeoh and Quan became the first actors to win the award portraying a character speaking Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese.

In another standout film, Brendan Fraser took home Best Actor for the psychological drama The Whale. It also won for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. The German-language film All Quiet on the Western Front, adapted from the book by Erich Maria Remarque, had nine nominations, winning four Academy Awards. The film took home Best International Film, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Production Design.

“Naatu Naatu” from the adventure film RRR became the first Indian film song to win an Oscar with Best Original Song. The upbeat, Telugu-language song was composed by M. M. Keeravani and written by Chandrabose. The Elephant Whisperers became the first Indian film to win Best Documentary Short.

Navalny, about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, won Best Documentary Feature. Women Talking won Best Adapted Screenplay. Best Animated Feature went to Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.

New Zealand Filmmaker Taika Waititi
Credit: © Xavier Collin, Image Press Agency/Alamy Images

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month. All month long, Behind the Headlines will celebrate the accomplishments and heritage of Asians and Pacific Islanders.

Taika Waititi is a New Zealand filmmaker known for his comedies. In 2020, he became the first person of Māori ancestry to win an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. He won for the motion picture Jojo Rabbit (2019), based on the novel Caging Skies (2008) by Christine Leunens. He was also the first Indigenous (native) writer to be nominated for an Academy Award for a screenplay. Jojo Rabbit tells the story of a German boy whose mother is hiding a Jewish girl in their home during World War II (1939-1945). The boy struggles with his beliefs in Nazism and anti-Semitism (prejudice against Jews). He confronts these ideas in part in the form of his imaginary friend, a buffoonish Adolf Hitler, played by Waititi in the film.

Taika Cohen was born on Aug. 16, 1975, in Raukokore, on the North Island of New Zealand. For his professional career, he later adopted the surname of his father, the Māori artist Taika Waititi, who also went by Tiger. Taika means tiger in the Māori language. The young Taika grew up in Wellington with his mother, the educator Robin Cohen. He graduated from Victoria University of Wellington in 1997 with a degree in theater and arts. At the school, he formed a comedy duo called The Humourbeasts with the comic musician Jemaine Clement. Waititi later directed and wrote a few episodes of the television series “The Flight of the Conchords” (2007-2009) in which Clement co-starred with Bret McKenzie.

Waititi made his screen acting debut in the motion picture Scarfies (1999). He showed his first short film, John & Pogo (2002), at the New Zealand International Film Festival. His next short film, Two Cars, One Night (2003), was nominated for an Academy Award. Waititi’s first feature-length film was Eagle vs. Shark (2007). Both Eagle vs. Shark and his second feature film, Boy (2010), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Boy is a comedy-drama about the reunion of a Māori son with his father, played by Waititi. Waititi wrote and directed Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016). It surpassed Boy as the highest-grossing New Zealand-made film of all time.

Waititi and Clement co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in the short film What We Do in the Shadows: Interviews with Some Vampires (2005). It was expanded into a mockumentary (satirical documentary) film What We Do in the Shadows (2014), followed by a television series of the same name starting in 2019.

Waititi directed the Marvel Studios film Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and its sequel Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), which he also cowrote. He provided the voice for the rocklike warrior Korg in these and other Marvel Studios productions. Waititi has also worked on projects set in the “Star Wars” universe. Starting in 2022, he produced the comedy series “Our Flag Means Death.” The show follows Stede Bonnet, an aristocrat turned pirate who sailed with the famous Blackbeard, played by Waititi.