On Sunday night, Star Wars: The Last Jedi star Kelly Marie Tran made her debut on the Oscars red carpet, looking hot as hell in a stunning blue Jenny Packham gown. Looking awesome... then promptly misidentified as another Asian American woman on the red carpet, Olympic figure skater Mirai Nagasu. Oops.
All Look Same strikes again. It seems that whoever was on caption-writing duty at Getty Images, one of the world's leading photo agencies, had some trouble distinguishing between two totally different Asian ladies in blue-ish dresses, misidentifying Tran as Nagasu, and vice versa, in a number of their captions.
Of course, the mistake got lit up on Twitter.
BWAHAHAHAHAH WITHOUT FAIL WHITE MEDIA GONNA WHITE.
— Jenny Yang's gonna be at SXSW (@jennyyangtv) March 5, 2018
"When racists think all Asians look alike. This is @kellymarietran not @mirainagasu, @vraimagazine. #OscarsSoWhite #oscars @starwars #StarWars" via @ykhong pic.twitter.com/IYGlPYnSs6
But at least the #AsiansAllLookAlike media are CONSISTENT.
— Jenny Yang's gonna be at SXSW (@jennyyangtv) March 5, 2018
Hey, @GettyImages, @mirai_nagasu is not @kellymarietran Lord have mercy. God forbid they both wear blue.
via @lsirikul #Oscars #OscarsSoWhite #Oscars2018 pic.twitter.com/2BVFYi0WKi
Tran served as a presenter during the ceremony alongside her Last Jedi co-stars. Nagasu, fresh from competing at the PyeongChang games, where she became the first American woman to land a triple axel in Olympic competition, was attending the Academy Awards with fellow skater Adam Rippon as guests of Access.
Look, Tran and Nagasu are respectively awesome, but aside from wearing relatively similar shades of blue and existing in the general vicinity of one another Sunday evening, they look nothing alike. Can we safely say that this gaffe would not have happened to two white celebrities? One Asian on the red carpet is fine -- they can handle the one -- but more than one is apparently just too confusing and captions get fucked.
Pretty soon, Getty Images was scrambling,
LMAAAAAOOOOOOO!!!! @GettyImages better take out the trash that made the mistake happen in the 1st place. Backtracking faster than Jimmy Kimmel's LaLaLand announcement last year. @kellymarietran is not @mirai_nagasu LOLOLOL #AllAsiansLookAlike #Oscars #Oscars2018 #OscarsSoWhite pic.twitter.com/PGrg2N0Opb
— Jenny Yang's gonna be at SXSW (@jennyyangtv) March 5, 2018
And on Monday, the photo service issued an apology to Tran and Nagasu:
"Getty Images sincerely apologizes for the images of Kelly Marie Tran that incorrectly identified her as Olympian Mirai Nagasu and was licensed by customers who trusted the accuracy of the caption information.
"Getty Images holds itself to a high standard of editorial integrity and has robust measures in place to ensure our content ingestion process upholds these standards. We, like all news agencies, regret when these measures fail to capture an error.
"We distribute the work of a number of excellent image partners who are also covering major events such as The Oscars and as soon as the caption error was brought to our attention, the caption was amended and the correct images provided to our customers.
"We apologize to Ms Tran and Ms Nagasu for this error and meant no disrespect."
No disrespect, you say? HuffPost notes that the initial statement from Getty misspelled "Tran" as "Tan." Twice.
So Getty sent a genuine apology for mixing up Kelly Marie Tran and Mirai Nagasu. But then we realized they wrote "Tan" not "Tran." Twice. In the apology. At a time when Asians are fighting for proper representation, pls let's learn from this and do better https://t.co/JMP8GOVKSX pic.twitter.com/YAfuvpsJ3a
— HuffPost Asian Voices (@HPAsianVoices) March 6, 2018
Somebody over there really needs to get their shit together.
