Michelle Yeoh Is The First Asian Woman To Win A Best Actress Oscar

It’s Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh, now, bitches! Back in 2001, Halle Berry became the first woman of color to win Best Actress for Monster Ball, and last night, she took a trip down memory lane and presented 60-year-old Michelle as the second woman of color to win the award. Luckily for all of us, Halle has more restraint than Adrien Brody had with her, and she didn’t make out with Michelle against her will after the win.

Miss Michelle has been cleaning house through awards season, and she has already won multiple accolades for her performance in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. She collected a Golden Globe, a Hollywood Critics Association award, an Independent Spirit Award, and the Screen Actors Guild award. She was nominated at the British Academy Film Awards and the Critics Choice Movie Awards, too, but bitch, who cares about those two losses when now she’s got the BIG ONE! At the Oscars, Michelle was nominated with Cate Blanchett for Tár, Michelle Williams for The Fabelmans, Ana de Armas for Blonde (which is INSANE because she’s actually HORRIBLE in that wretched film), and Andrea Riseborough for To Leslie. And Michelle Yeoh beat all those women because she’s That Girl™. Here’s Halle and Jessica Chastain presenting Michelle her win:

Michelle Yeoh accepts the Oscar for Best Actress for her outstanding performance in 'Everything Everywhere All At Once' #Oscars #Oscars95 pic.twitter.com/fIDMBH1rEy

— The Academy (@TheAcademy) March 13, 2023

Michelle spoke to IndieWire after winning her SAG award at the end of last month, and she talked about how the movie seemed to touch a lot of people:

“For us to be promoting a movie for a year, it’s hard work. But it is easy work when people respond to it, and respond in such a beautiful way,” Yeoh told IndieWire. “I have mothers that come up and say, “I’m not sure I understand your movie, but you were pretty interesting. Pretty good.” And then they say, “But the most important thing is my daughter saw it, and she called me, and I haven’t spoken to her for a few months,” because the mother-daughter relationship is always complicated already. This movie has somehow started a healing process, and opened a communication platform for husbands and wives, for mothers and daughters, for fathers and daughters, for people.”

Looks like some of those people were Oscar voters, baby! And Michelle’s career has been soaring since the nominations came pouring in for EEAAO, and she’s gonna be busy for the next while as she’s working on Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, is starring in an Agatha Christie adaptation, A Haunting in Venice, and she’s gonna get a piece of that billion-dollar pie known as Avatar since she’s also been cast in Avatar 3, and Avatar 4, and she’s ALSO going to be in the two-part Wicked musical. The Asian Meryl Streep has ascended!

If this kind of equality keeps up at the Oscars, then I think we can expect the next woman of color to win a Best Actress Oscar in tenish years. If it took 74 years for a Black woman to win the first time, and then another 22 for the next woman of color, I think we should guess that in 7-10 years, another will get it. The 2033 Oscars are gonna be so “woke“!

Pic: PA Images/INSTARimages