Pictured above: Chloe Zhao. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
By Casey Roepke ‘21
News Editor
Chloé Zhao ’05 became the first woman of color to win an Academy Award for Best Director at the 93rd annual Academy Awards on Sunday, April 25. Zhao, a Mount Holyoke alumna from the class of 2005, was nominated for three Oscars for her third film “Nomadland,” which received the Oscar for Best Picture.
Zhao was the clear frontrunner in the Oscars race for Best Director and Best Picture after racking up wins from the Golden Globes, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Independent Spirit Awards, Critics Choice Awards and more than 15 other directing awards before the Academy Awards. Her win marks just the second time a woman has won an Academy Award for directing, 11 years after Kathryn Bigelow’s victory for “The Hurt Locker'' in 2010.
At Mount Holyoke, Zhao majored in politics and took courses in the film department under Robin Blaetz, who currently serves as a professor of film studies and the chair of the department of film media theater — and who taught Zhao’s introductory film class in 2002.
“Film is an incredibly powerful cultural force,” Blaetz said about Zhao’s win on the College’s website. “[Zhao] understood that if you want to make a difference in the world, this is how you do it. This is how you talk to the world.”
After Mount Holyoke, Zhao studied film production at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, participating in student films and learning from filmmakers like Spike Lee. Her debut feature film, “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” (2015), was an almost-true story of the real-life residents of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Zhao cast real people to play their own slightly fictionalized counterparts, a tactic she used in both of her later films.
On its critical review of “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” film review website Rotten Tomatoes wrote that the film “establishes writer-director Chloé Zhao as a gifted filmmaker and empathetic storyteller.” Zhao’s second film, “The Rider,” also bridges real stories with fiction, as she tells the story of a man she met while working on her first film on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
“Nomadland” follows in the tradition of filling Zhao’s cast with nonprofessionals, though the film’s main character, Fern, is played by Frances McDormand, who claimed an Oscar win for Best Actress in a Leading Role. As previously reported by the Mount Holyoke News, “Nomadland” is “an intimate portrayal of an often overlooked community,” and the story traces Fern’s journey from place to place as she sleeps in her van and works temporary jobs to keep herself moving.
“It is gratifying to see more women, and women of color, leading the nominations and securing major awards this year,” President of the College Sonya Stephens said on the College’s website, “and especially so to see Chloé Zhao so widely recognized and so richly rewarded for the subtlety, empathy and power of her cinematic world-building.”
In Zhao’s acceptance speech, she shared a memory from her childhood, when she and her father would memorize and recite Chinese poems to each other.
“There’s one that I remember so dearly. It’s called the ‘Three Character Classics,’” she said. “The first phrase goes: ‘People at birth are inherently good.’ Those six letters had such a great impact on me when I was a kid, and I still truly believe them today. Even though sometimes it might seem like the opposite is true, I have always found goodness in the people I met everywhere I went in the world.”
Zhao dedicated her win to the people who embody the idea that people are born “inherently good.”
“This is for anyone who had the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves and to hold on to the goodness in each other, no matter how difficult it is to do that,” she said. “And this is for you. You inspire me to keep going.”
Zhao’s next film is “Eternals,” a big-budget Marvel movie set for release in November 2021.