UCLA Asia Institute, CA
May 26 2007

Packaging Asianness
By Ada Tseng

This year’s Asian Excellence Awards have reason to celebrate: the
increase of recognizable stars as guests (from Chow Yun-fat, Margaret
Cho, Kal Penn to Quentin Tarantino, Antoine Fuqua and Kenny G) as
well as a likely rise of viewership (for the first time, an hour-long
edited version was broadcast on E! Entertainment Television). But as
we’re shining our pretty actresses at the cameras and feeding our
successes to the mainstream in cute bite-sized morsels, what are we
losing?

Red carpets and superficial crap for the Spider-Man 3 crowd: two
things that feel pretty useless to people who care about substance,
yet two things unfortunately so crucial to the wheels of the
Hollywood industry. And when you’re small, unrecognized, and
desperate to grow (like the Asian American community in the media),
there are times when you have to suck it up, play along with the big
boys, and hope for the best.

For the AZN Asian Excellence Awards, the equivalent of that involved
putting on a bright smile, talking about how happy you were to be
celebrating Asianness, and then hoping your artistry won’t be
compromised by all the time spent amongst the smoke and mirrors.

APA was on the scene for both the red carpet and the ceremony, as
this year’s Asian Excellence Awards took place on our stomping
grounds, the UCLA campus. They set up the long red carpet outside on
the courtyard in front of Royce Hall, and even though celebrities had
to be dropped off at the turnaround and walk themselves there, it was
still a rather elaborate ordeal. Many media stations were covering
the event. Lots of students and bystanders crowded at the Royce
steps, arching their necks to get a glimpse of a John Cho, a Rex Lee,
or a Grace Park. Sanjaya was there, Survivor winner Yul Kim was
there, Dancing with the Stars judge Carrie Ann Inaba was there. From
the outside, the red carpet is a glamorous place — beautiful
outfits, tons of cameras, celebrities, glitz, and glamour.

But for the people actually working on the red carpet, it’s often
kind of a drag. Hours of standing and waiting just to talk to someone
for two minutes, ask the generic questions, and use 30 seconds of it
for a sound bite. From the opposite perspectives, the celebrities who
have to walk down the carpet go one by one, answering the same
questions, exuding the same poised joy, hoping that the press doesn’t
use the footage to make them look silly. Again, it’s part of the
game. And here we all are: playing it.

I’m not sure how many people in the industry (including Asian
Americans) actually take the Asian Excellence Awards very seriously.
In past years, it seemed like the person who took home the award won
not necessarily because their performances were amazing, but because
they were the only ones out there. Why else would Bai Ling win an
"Internationally Renowned Actress" award? Such was the depressing
state of Asians being represented in film and television.

This year, it’s better. It’s noticable that some categories, such as
Best Supporting Actress in Television, had five nominees, while some,
such as Best Actor in Film, only had three. (Guess there weren’t any
more.) But at the same time, you can look at some categories — for
example, Best Actor in Television (Naveen Andrews, Daniel Dae Kim,
Masi Oka, and B.D. Wong) — and think: "Sure, technically they’re
actually supporting roles, but they’re all pretty good, and they’re
all in high-profile shows." Progress!

But there’s a reason it all still seems rather awkward and
amateurish. In fact, there are multiple layers of why it still seems
awkward and amateurish, but let’s start with the event itself. These
types of award shows are not really meant to celebrate "achievement"
in the grander sense of the word, they’re meant to celebrate
celebrity. And as much as we’d like to participate in the glitz and
glamour, we’re just not there yet. We’re grateful the event exists,
to have this opportunity to shine, but when it comes down to it, as a
community, we’re still playing dress-up.

It’s one thing to watch Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock have stupid,
awkward, cheesy banter onstage before they present an MTV Movie
Award. It’s another thing to see Michelle Kruseic and Alp.de.Ap
seeming like they don’t really know what to do. When Daniel Dae Kim
and Grace Park deliver an opening intro sketch that’s just really not
funny at all, you love them dearly for having the courage to take on
the task of hosting the awards, but it’s kind of like like watching
your cousins performing a high school talent show. (Read more about
the awards and see APA’s red carpet video here.)

But here’s the next level of ridiculousness: the E! broadcast version
of the show (which played on May 24th). The show is going to be
played in its entirety on AZN, but let’s face it, no one watches AZN.
So, luckily for the producers, this is the first year that E!
Entertainment Television has decided to broadcast the Asian
Excellence Awards on their channel, introducing a whole other
mainstream demographic that will be exposed to our Asian excellence.

The only caveat: it’s a one-hour edited version. You’re taking a two
and a half hour show and condensing it into one hour. Minus the five
minute intro of E! reporter Jason Kennedy talking to people on the
red carpet about how awesome this all is.

So in order to have this opportunity to show ourselves off to the
world, what are we losing?

Well, I’ll tell you exactly what we’re losing.

What’s interesting about E!’s broadcast is that instead of choosing
to concentrate on the most prominent awards and cutting out entire
sections, they basically went through the entire awards ceremony,
trimming a little bit from every single scene throughout. So, it was
kind of like watching the entire awards show in super speed.

No one actually walks to get the award; they just magically appear at
the podium. Acceptance speeches are edited in half. "Witty" banter
between presenters are shockingly less witty when suddenly one of the
most relevant parts of making the punchline work has been cut out.
Montages — most notably Chow Yun-fat’s career retrospective — are
strikingly less cool (and more Americanized) that I had remembered.

In essence, you’re taking the mentality of the red carpet —
rapidfire editing, everything whittled down to sound bites —
throwing it all together and calling it a show. Welcome to E!
Entertainment Television. Welcome to the mainstream.

There were three comedians that performed at the Asian Excellence
Awards: Russell Peters, Dat Pham, and Margaret Cho. This was arguably
the best part of the show; all of them were on top of their game, and
they each had maybe five minutes on stage to deliver their chops.

Cut to the E! broadcast: Russell Peters — completely gone. The only
evidence that he was there was when they cut to his reaction when Kal
Penn won the Best Actor award for The Namesake (probably because
they’re both Indian.)

Dat Pham was reduced to about a minute, a bit about Yao Ming as a
mutant Asian basketball player. Margaret Cho also reduced to about a
minute — conveniently keeping her tame (less funny) joke about being
mistaken for Lucy Liu and cutting out her more relevant comedy about
how she felt after the Virginia Tech shooting after finding out that
not only was the killer Korean, but his last name was also Cho.

Rex Lee’s acceptance speech: They have him thanking his managers and
then thanking everyone for "laughing at my jokes." Unbeknownst to the
television viewer, he had actually made jokes earlier in his
acceptance speech that he was thanking the audience for laughing for.

Rob Schneider making fun of AZN TV (where our motto is "at least we
have more viewers than Armenian TV.") and how he’s never been
nominated for an AZN award ("I guess I have to wait for the Half
Asian awards.") and making politically incorrect Asian jokes.
Predictably, also cut.

In one of the most memorable (inadvertantly) hilarious moments of the
night, Kenny G walks down the aisles, playing a famous Chinese Teresa
Teng song on the soprano saxophone, before presenting the award to
his best friend, Nobu, calling him "my Japanese brother." So awsome.
But alas… Cut!

Ironically, on the broadcast, it seemed like they skimmed over the
Best Picture (Letters from Iwo Jima), Best Actress-Film (Rinko
Kikuchi), and Best Supporting Actress-Television (Mindy Kaling)
awards — but in reality, those parts weren’t even recorded. Likely,
they couldn’t get any of them to make an acceptance tape. The
audience was left hanging without explanation, confused by why Daniel
Dae Kim and Grace Park were doing their good-bye bit before three of
the main categories were presented.

Also, unbeknownst to either the live audience or the TV audience,
Journey from the Fall won the Outstanding Asian Independent Film
award. In fact, a quick Google News search shows that only the PR
Newswire press release service reported on their win. Judging by the
fact that, as of May 25th, nine days after the awards ceremony, their
official website still spells nominee In Between Days director So
Yong Kim’s name "So Wong Kim" — it was probably pretty clear from
the beginning that the AZN Excellence Awards don’t really care about
independent film.

The most painful part of watching the E! broadcast was watching them
cut to audience reactions, purely to get a well-known face on camera.
First, the editors would destroy a joke by editing out part of the
presenter’s setup, and then they would cut to a celebrity laughing
hysterically. I can almost guarantee that they found a clip where a
celebrity was laughing and inserted it into the broadcast where
convenient. It was like they created a canned laugh track; the Asian
Excellence Awards became a sitcom where you hear people laughing at
things that weren’t funny to begin with.

Overall, knowing what it was (a mediocre show) and seeing what they
turned it into (a sell-out commercial promo), the Asian Excellence
Awards were kind of a disappointing reminder of the hoops we still
need to jump through in order to increase our presence in Hollywood.
It was a disappointing reminder that the mainstream still rules, and
in a world where Justin Lin is twenty times more valued for Fast and
the Furious: Tokyo Drift than Better Luck Tomorrow ($60 million in
the domestic box office vs. $3 million), we’re gonna have to
sacrifice some people for the Spider-Man 3 crowd in order to get
anywhere.

But despite it all, it was still uplifting to see all the stars came
out to support the community — perhaps some of them knowing in the
back of their heads that they might be made to look silly. It was
uplifting to see people that I hadn’t even heard about that have
already completed work on something exciting that is coming up in the
future. All and all, the best thing that we can take away from this
is that hopefully people who watch watch the Asian Excellence Awards
will, having not realized there were so many Asian faces in
television and film, be intrigued to find out more. Only when they
put out the extra effort will they discover the substance behind it.

The entire broadcast will debut on AZN TV Monday, May 28th.