LIFE + OSCARS
The Return of Faith And Human Kindness
The 95th Academy Awards was not just about films and accolades, it was a full circle of what we all have endured for the last three years
Since the 80th Golden Globe Awards in January 2023, I have been a mess. An emotional wreck. Then came the 29th Screen Actors Guild Awards in February. Tonight — we are now in March — at the Oscars, it was the apex of my waterworks. My eyes are now officially swollen. But it’s been a good cry. A catharsis.
Since the nominations began, I’ve been trailing the movies and actors like on a hunt because unlike previous years with repeat winners and familiar names such as Bradley Cooper, Steven Spielberg and Jane Champion, the 2023 offerings have interesting stories of newcomers and comebacks. I coined my own categories for them: The First-Timers, The Odd and The Forgotten. Even if you’ve not been following the award shows religiously, you may have caught wind of their stories. After tonight, rest assured they’ll be making the rounds of headlines.
This year’s Oscars is also like a tabula rasa, a clean slate to last year’s off-putting behavior displayed by Will Smith, supported by a shocked but also helpless audience, when he punched host Chris Rock live on stage. This year is about kindness, a redemption of human goodness, in all of us. It had to be. We’ve been through enough.
Due to the time difference, I waited and watched, Googling whatever that was made available while sitting on my bed in my room in Shah Alam, Malaysia. I was also reading and editing stories on Medium when fellow writer Jocelyn G pushed me and my emotional state off the proverbial cliff — in a good way.
Her recent piece was a reflection on surviving COVID-19. It hit me then with a boulder of sobriety, it was no longer about the movies that left me crying on my bed reading the results and listening to the touching speeches.
March 2023 marks our third year surviving the pandemic.
It was the roller-coaster ride I was pushed to get on, the subscription I don’t recall agreeing to pay for, the vacation I was forced to join with strangers on a cruise ship.
I entered the pandemic being in a relationship, I exited weighing less and sans a partner. Many of my favorite shops closed down. Places I saw growing up as a child, hotels I frequented on holidays with my family, eateries I haunted through decades of my career, all finally said goodbye and closed their doors for the last time.
Every week there was a headline that said a beloved actor / musician has passed on. You feel bummed out for a while as you reflect on your own mortality.
Surrendering myself to the government’s decisions, embroiled in conflicting media reports, and putting blind faith in touted experts I’ve never met, I subjected myself to two vaccines and two booster shots.
I took a gamble on my life, as did my loved ones, all the while just hoping for the best in the unforeseen future. It was Love in the Time of Corona, even Gabriel García Márquez would have written to the letter what I felt.
So much had happened around the world and to people, that you’d roast me alive if I bring up the detail again. So I won’t. But after close to 36 months of mitigation and safety measures feeling like a survivor on a reality show, last month, I was finally struck down with COVID-19.
I had the body aches, the fever, the sniffles, the cough, the phlegm, the brain fog, the whole works. Thank you SARS-CoV-2. It was a pleasure getting acquainted with you, finally. You crept in and made yourself the lover inside me.
And now, watching the speeches by winners at the Oscars, I was crying holding my water bottle in replace of my Oscar, thanking members of the Universe (to an audience consisting of my mother’s seven fat cats) that I made it through my own homecoming-survival movie.
Fuck, there was a time when we didn’t know what was waiting for us on the other side of the vaccine trail. The whole pandemic stretch has been all about perseverance, faith and making history.
Talking about history, as I was ruminating through the scenes and action sequences of my personal movie, this alert came in via my Gmail inbox:
The crying resumed.
Yeoh, Fraser, Quan… you guys made it. I am over the moon for your success. You guys, and your story of survival, are the heroes at the 2023 Oscars we thought we wanted, but turned out to be what we needed.
The joy seeing their win, their tears of waiting and waiting, of being challenged, of being seen and heard past their prime only in their fifties and sixties, reminded me of our own 36 months of emotional and physiological journey of waiting and watching, watching and waiting. COVID is still with us. Heck, COVID is inside us, like a supporting actor. Perhaps that’s meant to be.
Together, WE have made history. We survived. Some by luck, some by hanging on to our dreams, some by the skin of our teeth.
I am just glad to be alive, writing this.
I leave you with Ke Huy Quan’s Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor with a humbling message about being relentless; Michelle Yeoh inspiring us to believe in our dreams; Brendan Fraser about dedicating to The Whale against a pandemic; the entire ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ team for winning Best Picture and the importance of storytelling.
A standing ovation to all of us, for making it this far.
