HOLLYWOOD INSIDER

H.E.R. gets 1st Oscar nom, Chloe Zhao gets 4 Oscar nods and more Oscar first-timers

Los Angeles — It must be good to be H.E.R. these days!

After winning the Song of the Year Award at the Grammys for her song “I Can’t Breathe” as well as Best R&B Song plum for “Better Than I Imagined,” the Filipina-American singer-composer woke up the following day, on March 15, with the announcement that she just got her first Oscar nomination.

H.E.R. was nominated in the Best Original Song Category for her composition “Fight For You” for the movie “Judas and the Black Messiah.”

The 23-year-old from Vallejo, California, was born Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson. Her  mom, Agnes, hails from Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija and her musician dad, Kenny Wilson, is African American.

In her acceptance speech at the Grammys, H.E.R. said, “We wrote this song over FaceTime. And I didn't imagine that my fear and my pain would turn into impact, and it would possibly turn into change. And I think that's what this is about. And that's why I write music. That's why I do this. So I'm so, so, so grateful. I want to thank God for giving me the gift of a voice and a pen, and using me as a vessel to, you know, create change.”

She thanked her parents too. She added, “I want to thank my mom. I recorded this song myself in my bedroom at my mom's house, and I want to thank my dad. He cried. He was in tears when I wrote the song and I played it for him. He was the first person I played it for.”

Finally, she stressed, “But remember, we are the change that we wish to see. And, you know, that fight that we had in us the summer of 2020, keep that same energy. Thank you.”

Chloe Zhao, the director-producer-writer of “Nomadland,” on the other hand, bagged four Oscar noms and became the first woman and the first Asian American female to receive four nominations in a single year.

It was her first Oscar nomination in the Best Picture, Best Film Editing, Best Directing and Best Adapted Screenplay categories. She also became the first woman of color to be nominated for Directing.

Other firsts at the virtual Oscar nominations, hosted by husband-and-wife team Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra Jonas at the crack of dawn, were Emerald Fennell becoming the first woman to be nominated for her feature film directing debut for her movie, “Promising Young Woman.”

In the acting categories, 11 individuals are first time nominees: Riz Ahmed, Andra Day, Vanessa Kirby, Amanda Seyfried, Steven Yeun, Yuh-Jung Youn, Maria Bakalova, Chadwick Boseman, Leslie Odom, Jr., Paul Raci, and Lakeith Stanfield.

We talked to Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”), Riz Ahmed (“Sound of Metal”), Steven Yeun (“Minari”), Andra Day (“The United States vs. Billie Holiday”) and Amanda Seyfried (“Mank”) and below are excerpts from our conversations with them:

How was the experience as a new director? Would you continue to multi-task, that is acting, writing and directing?

I just loved it. I loved everything about it. I found it really, truly wonderful. I'm not sure I'd ever be able to direct something I haven't written. For me, those two things are one and the same, which is wonderful, because I love writing. I find it immensely pleasurable.

I'm very happy to write things for other people but I wouldn't be able to direct somebody else's material effectively, not in the same way because it feels very intwined to me.

And as for the acting, I love it. I will always love it. It's a pleasure and especially doing something like "The Crown," which is just so many excellent, talented people. But honestly, it's also somebody else's schedule, and you're very much subject to change all of those things. Those slightly regrettable sad things, about acting that when I've got so much on, I'm probably less and less likely to do that. But if there's something irresistible, I will always try and fit in. Luckily, I'm obsessed with working so I usually try and cram as much as I can in.

Thematically, your movie is very important because of the #MeToo movement. What do you think are the next battles that are really urgent for us women?

An immense question. As a parent of a very young child, maternity rights are an enormous thing. That until there's equality with parents and until women feel safe to have families, that their job won't go away and that childcare is free and I think there are so many things that actually there are so many problems very specifically that mothers face in the workplace.

Now during COVID-19, it's incredibly interesting to see how many partners who thus far have been very equal have reverted to the older stereotypes which is that the women are doing much, much more at home, much more of the childcare and also doing their jobs which necessarily means that they have less time for themselves. As soon as we get used to the idea that it is an equal responsibility and that it is the responsibility of society to help women do this then there's a threshold for every woman in the workplace and that's just profoundly unfair.

Riz Ahmed

When you did the movie, did you think of how you would feel if you lose your tool, your voice? How would you feel if that was being slowly taken away from you?

In many ways Ruben is more different to me than any character I’ve ever played before — that was truly what attracted me to the role.

But there was also an emotional entry point for me which was exactly what you’re pointing out, which is that I have actually been in that position a couple of times in a couple of different ways over the course of my life and my career.

At certain points, I wondered whether I’d be able to continue doing this just for financial reasons. Doing back-to-back indie films that might be well received critically doesn’t necessarily translate to me being able to make ends meet. 

But also from a health perspective, something I’ve spoken about before is around the time of doing “Bourne” and “Star Wars” and “Venom” and the Emmy and stuff and releasing a couple of albums, I hit a wall of exhaustion and my body stopped me and I was pretty much out of action for a couple of months, almost incapacitated. I wondered whether I would fully recover, things were pretty bad actually.

So when this script came to me, it was both the fact that this character felt so different to me and I knew I’d have to try and transform and learn all these skills, which was very appealing to me although very scary. But there was this emotional entry point, I felt this feeling, the fear of losing the very thing that gets you up in the morning, losing the thing that you define yourself true. I know how terrifying that can be so in many ways, it required the most prep but in other ways it was the most personal things I’ve done.

What did you discover about your own senses going through this experience?

What I decided I would like to do is to just respect the experience of hearing loss to some extent and to try and experience it best I could. I got these inverted hearing aids, almost hearing blockers. So they were hearing aids that were modified and placed deep inside my ear canal and switched into a white noise setting so I couldn’t hear anything. I couldn’t hear other people; I couldn’t hear myself. I tried to approximate some of that hearing loss early on in the process.

Honestly, it did heighten my awareness, you do listen more with the rest of your body. It does sensitize you to be just very in tune with what this person is communicating. So there is an intensity to that experience but I guess what I would like to talk about rather than just talk about the loss of the hearing loss, I want to talk about the gain as well.

Because maybe deaf people don’t think of deafness as a disability and rightly so, it’s a very rich culture and very rich identity. I’ve gained so much from being immersed in that community for seven months. One of the big things I gained was communicating through American Sign Language, which means you communicate through your body.

There’s this trope in the deaf community, they say that hearing people are emotionally repressed because they hide behind words whereas deaf community, signing community they communicate with their body. The first time I started really having deep conversations in the American Sign Language I started getting really emotional. My signing instructor Jeremy Stone, who I named the character partly after, I called him Ruben Stone, Jeremy said yeah, when you communicate in sign you communicate with your whole body. So actually yes, I did lose some things from that experience, assimilating it, but what I gained was so much more.

Steven Yeun

How much do you identify with your character Jacob and how much of Jacob is in you?

That hits upon a lot of things. I have my own children now.  In that regard, I think the bridge of understanding my father’s perspective was deepened. You look at your father from your own gaze as a child and, you contextualize how you understand them, but when you go through something similar to what they’ve gone through, you gain a whole new perspective. So that was part of it. 

You know where Jacob stands that I identity with on maybe a human level on just a direct one-to-one is this feeling of living in the gaps of life, being in the in-between spaces in a lot of situations. Not just caught between America, the country, and Korea, the country, but I’m also midwestern, and so there’s a gap life to that as well.  Even as an actor, a person of color in this business, a lot of us are treading new territory. There’s this nebulous space that’s a new frontier that I think a lot of us are going through. I identify with Jacob in that regard too. Just trying to make his own path.

As a son of immigrant parents, what was your American dream?

My dream is a deeper understanding of myself, the freedom to understand myself. In some ways, the life that I’m able to live right now is incredible. It’s a dream. We moved here, and my dad had nothing, and we built it from the ground up. To see the sacrifices that they’ve made and the hard work that they put in, but then also for them to be able to connect back to me in a profound way where I get to be in a film like this.

I don’t infantilize them or over glorify them by saying we are the product of their sacrifice. But also, we’re just the product of human beings trying to live a life. The dream that I have is an extension of my father’s, is an extension of my mother’s. It’s just continual freedom for generation and generation after. So, I look at my son and my daughter and I hope that they are able to find more freedom in their own humanity too.

Do you have special memories of your grandmother?

My grandma was so sweet. She was so tough and so ambitious. I never really got to know my maternal grandmother because she passed away before I was old enough to really understand, but my paternal grandmother lived with us for a couple of years, and I have all the funny memories, some inappropriate, but some hilarious.

But I think overall the spirit of my grandmother was she’s the mother of five boys from that time, and to be that tough and that resilient, to take that much, to give that much, to not have anyone really see her in her own family, I can only really understand now, to have been something pretty incredible.

For her to have lived as long as she did, for her to have fought and have thrived, to really be there for her grandchildren, too, I think one of the things that Yuh-Jung Youn says, that I really love and contextualizes, I think, the perspective of a grandparent, that I don’t have yet because I only have young kids, is she’s just able to love them and observe them. She doesn’t need to teach them anything. She doesn’t need to police them. She doesn’t need to tell them what’s what. She can just observe and show them love, and perhaps that’s something I should also be able to have the purity and freedom to do as a parent.

But as parent, you’re just busy worrying a lot, so I’ll try to find a good balance. But, hearing that from her it really made me understand my grandmother. She was never trying to discipline us or suppress us, she was just trying to love us, and I think that’s really beautiful.

Andra Day

With all the things going on in the past year and now, were you involved in any activism projects?

Yes definitely. I worked with the ACLU, I worked with Equal Justice Initiative as well.  Bryan Stevenson is just so brilliant, if you haven’t had a chance to read his book “Just Mercy” you should definitely do that, because he is a modern living hero. He’s only missing a cape. 

So just being very vocal about just making legislation, creating legislation that requires equality and brings about equality working with Black Lives Matter as well too and just trying to gear my music and just what I do creatively toward the movement. Working with organizations to even get our textbooks to actually tell the truth about the history of the nation because again like I said, when you know the truth about someone’s struggling contribution, it’s much more difficult to hate them. Then working on the political front as well too. So it’s whatever we can do. I know it’s a very odd time and difficult to do in the midst of a global pandemic, but whatever we can do on both fronts, on a political front and also just trying to help everyday people get through this pandemic.

What surprised you about Billie Holiday?

Her magnetism. What I discovered deeper about her was the way that people loved her directly, was directly related to the fact that she allowed people to be who they were around her.  She’s the epitome of the judgement free zone.  She’s got a lot of her own stuff going on, but that was a big one for me. She just loved people right where they were at. She allowed them to be who they were right where they were at.  She didn’t hold things over people’s head and so that was just another thing that made me fall in love with her even more. 

Then just the depth of her fight, I don’t know what it’s like to get up and sing “Rise Up” and if I do it, I may die tonight. I don’t know that feeling.  So it just helped me to just love her even more, identify with her even more, but also it turned her into even more of a supernova for me, because I already loved her.  But the fact that she was willing to get up and do that was incredible.

Amanda Seyfried

As a mother of two, how have you handled the pandemic?

I will say the birth experience was a little different, sadly different. One thing I was able to have my mom there and my husband and my midwife is a dear friend so that was great because a lot of people in the hospital aren’t getting [the same support]. So I was mostly pregnant during the pandemic. I got pregnant halfway through filming so I was in the very early stages of my somewhat traumatic…just pretty ill in the beginning and so I was shooting while I was in the beginning stages.

I really spent this pandemic on the farm pregnant. So I actually didn’t go crazy. I only am a mother of two the last five weeks so this is all so new to me and my priorities are a little different. I try to get a nap in. The whole pandemic I was very creative. I got into everything, rug hooking, embroidery, sewing, quilting, on top of everything I already do on a daily basis. I have to do something. I don’t miss being on set, which is great because I was able to do three movies back-to-back so I was able to relax into my hobbies, when I am at home. It’s been great, I honestly am so lucky. My mom is the best. So we have three parents here. Although two kids are…it’s not the same as one. I was talking about that earlier, it’s a lot. Priorities man, kids make you really put them into place. It’s beautiful.

This year is quite complicated with COVID-19 and the lockdown. How do you see the reality today?

It’s complicated because in some ways I do feel like the tension, the mounting tension was inevitable. Of course, in the last four years we have definitely hit walls that I never thought this would happen in my life because I was so…I felt really comfortable living in a democracy, living in a free world and the tension and the threat of having our rights taken away and our healthcare in jeopardy.

There was a period of frustration this summer that really made feel a little bit hopeless. You try to stay away from the news but you can’t because there’s so much you can do, you can be of service, you can just keep speaking, keep learning, depending on what it is we’re dealing with that day.

These movements, Black Lives Matter and protesting, that’s our right, we have the right…I think it’s a relief of tension, it’s really important, these things are really important. When we see something unjust, we need to fight against it and I think that’s really beautiful. I’ve seen a lot of humanity and it’s given me hope through the treatment, the horrible treatment I actually see a lot of beauty in the humanity of coming together.

And I see this country as really strong and really beautiful and I feel more like a patriot than ever but also, I wish it didn’t take this much to get here; I wish there was a way that we could all unite without having to struggle this much for people to be dying. And my feelings are just so complicated. I’m so relieved that we’re almost at the end of this election because I do feel there’s a really great chance that we can get our country back because I do feel like it’s been taken away from us. So it’s a lot of feeling of loss but it’s also…I can’t not feel hopeful because I have children and I want to protect rights and personally I have a platform. I need to use it. I’ve never wanted to be political; I hate the idea of having to dive into that world but I don’t really have a choice now. Man, I just want to breathe again. I just want to take a deep breath; I think we all do. It’s not just our country; it’s affected the entire world.

How good are you at keeping secrets? Was it a conscious decision to keep your recent pregnancy a secret?

It’s been great. I mean, not being in LA or New York, where you might be found out. I really did keep it a secret because it's just such a novelty for me. I don't get to in these ways. There's a lot of privacy here on the farm. I do love sharing a lot via social media. It’s really fun. There are certain things I don't share. There are certain rules, but other than that I'm just an open book. It's hard for me to keep secrets to be honest. If it's somebody else's secret. Yes, I'll take it to the grave. I might tell my sister. But if it's my own secret, it's really hard. It's so difficult to keep a secret. I don't know. There's a weird instinct to share. You have seen I overshare. As I get older, what you see is what you get. It was definitely a challenge. Which is more fun. Because I was like, oh, by the way, I have a baby. — LA, GMA News