Chloé Zhao won the Oscar for Best Director at Sunday’s Academy Awards, held on Sunday, 25th April, 2021.
In the last few months Nomadland, a film directed by Zhao’s has been winning big with three major prizes.
She took home the best directing trophy, thus becoming the first woman of colour to ever win the award and second woman to claim the title. Her film, “Nomadland,” also clinched the top prize of the night, best picture.
While accepting, the best Director award said: “I have always found goodness in the people I’ve met everywhere I went in the world.
“This is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves and to hold on to the goodness in other no matter how difficult it is to do that.”
Read Also: JAMB picks new date for Mock Examination
Nomadland is an American film produced in 2020 and based on the 2017 non-fiction book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century” by Jessica Bruder, which depicts a group of mostly older people who have taken to the road to take up seasonal jobs following the Great Recession of the late 2000s. Fern (Frances McDormand), a woman in her sixties, after losing everything in the Great Recession embarks on a journey through the American West. She lived as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad. Apart from McDormand, however, nearly everyone in the film is a real person, playing themselves, a fictionalised version.
Nomadland, as a film on survival however struck a chord in this pandemic-ravaged period.
The biggest surprise of the night was Anthony Hopkins winning the best actor trophy over the late Chadwick Boseman.
Boseman posthumously took home the best acting awards at the Critics Choice, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards this year.
Netflix won seven awards while Disney won five.
The night’s first award went to Emerald Fennell, the writer-director of the provocative revenge thriller “Promising Young Woman,” for best screenplay.
Best adapted screenplay went to the dementia drama “The Father.”
Matthew