Julie Delpy: Being female in Hollywood is worse than being black

Julie Delpy: Being female in Hollywood is worse than being black

"I sometimes wish I were African American because people don’t bash them afterward. It’s the hardest to be a woman."

My own observations: The Oscars are obviously a boring, white thing about boring, white-angst movies, but you can name lots of women and black people who have been nominated for Oscars. Now name an Asian. There's Ang Lee, of course, who is a great talent - and then ?????

Off the top of my head, the only Asian man I can remember who was nominated for an acting Oscar in the past thirty years was Ken Watanabe. Before that, I think Mr Myagi was nominated. And way back when I was a kid, there was Sessue Hayakawa. There have been a couple of Asian women nominated for best supporting actress, and I think an Iranian actress was nominated about a decade ago for The House of Sand and Fog, although I can't remember her name. Then there was the girl in Babel who got naked and didn't have a single line. I'm not even sure why they nominated her, but I'm pretty sure she was Japanese. I can't remember her name either. That shows you no high-profile careers emerged from their Oscar nominations.

OK, that makes one Taiwanese director, three Japanese performers and one Iranian. Now think about that. The United States is filled with millions of great citizens from mainland China, Korea, Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. How many Oscar nominations come from those ethnic groups? I think it is literally just that obscure Cambodian surgeon who won for The Killing Fields despite never having acted before.

Bill Maher was making the point that black people are underrepresented in big blockbusters because the Asian market is so important and Asians don't accept black people in heroic leading roles, so Hollywood avoids that. I have my doubts about that argument, although I have no idea whether he's factually correct, but my head says, "If the Asian market is so fuckin' important, why aren't there far more leading Asian characters?"

I guess you could include the Tilly sisters to fill the Chinese quota, if you really want to stretch the point, since their dad was Chinese, but I don't think anyone, either in America or Asia, thinks of them as Asian actresses, do they?

As for the Vietnamese representation - I got nothin'. Two million Americans, and never an Oscar nomination in any major category that I can remember. Is that right?

Now that I think about it, we have more than five million Native Americans. How many Oscars have they won? To my recollection, there are none in the high-profile categories. I think the only Oscar ever won by a Native American was Buffy Sainte-Marie's award for Best Song in a typical white-people movie (An Officer and a Gentleman).

So yeah, I agree that Oscar is a boring, white-people thing, but I have a feeling that women and black people have not gotten the shortest straws in that drawing.