Nominations for the 77th annual Golden Globe Awards were announced this morning, and as many predicted, Lulu Wang's indie hit The Farewell picked up a couple of nods, including a Best Actress nom for Awkwafina.
Golden Globes: Full List of Nominations
The rapper-turned-actress, aka Nora Lum, scored a nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy for her role as Billi, a Chinese American New Yorker who travels to China when her family puts on a fake wedding to say their final goodbyes to her terminally ill grandmother.
The Farewell also picked up a nomination, somewhat inexplicably, for Best Foreign Language Film.
Hollywood Foreign Press Association rules state that films are considered in the foreign language category if they include "more than 50 percent non-English dialogue." This technically puts The Farewell in the category with Spain's Pain & Glory, South Korea's Parasite, and France's Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Les Misérables.
But The Farewell is American as hell. It is an American film, written and directed by an American filmmaker and produced by an American production company. It is an Asian American film, reflective of so many of our experiences. The fact that it is performed almost entirely in Mandarin does not negate its heart and sensibility.
The Farewell deserves to recognized, or at least given consideration, in the Best Motion Picture - Drama category. Hell, why does a film have to be performed in 50 percent plus in English to be legit eligible in the Best Motion Picture categories anyway? I don't know, take it up with the HFPA, which regularly doesn't make sense.
What I'm saying is, the Golden Globe Awards are dumb.
But congratulations to The Farewell, which deserves better. (Are you listening, Oscars?)
More here: 'The Farewell' Deserves to Be Seen as an American Drama
