Asian group calls for not awarding ‘Licorice Pizza’

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An Asian American activist group is calling for an awards boycott of director Paul Thomas Anderson's "Licorice Pizza" over its use of a fake Asian accent.

In the film, a white male restaurateur, played by John Michael Higgins, speaks to his Japanese wife with a fake Asian accent. He appears again in the film with another Japanese woman, his new wife, and he repeats the attempted gag.

While the film has garnered overwhelmingly positive reviews and generated a ton of awards buzz, some critics and people on social media blasted it for its depiction of racism without any pushback from its characters.

"Due to the casual racism found in the movie 'Licorice Pizza,' the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) believes that Paul Thomas Anderson's film is not deserving of nominations in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director, or Best Original screenplay, and is asking other film critic associations to pass over it this awards season," MANAA said in a statement Dec. 18.

"To shower it with nominations and awards would normalize more egregious mocking of Asians in this country, sending the message that it's OK to make fun of them," the group said, noting the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes during the coronavirus pandemic.

Anderson responded: “I think it would be a mistake to tell a period film through the eyes of 2021. You can’t have a crystal ball, you have to be honest to that time. Not that it wouldn’t happen right now, by the way. My mother-in-law’s Japanese and my father-in-law is white, so seeing people speak English to her with a Japanese accent is something that happens all the time. I don’t think they even know they’re doing it.”

Sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen has previously said that while Anderson acknowledged that the movie was a "period" piece, the scenes still depicted racism “unfiltered.”

The film, which rolled out in limited release over Thanksgiving weekend, is a coming-of-age comedy-drama that stars Alana Haim (of the band Haim) and Cooper Hoffman (the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman), two young people growing up in the San Fernando Valley of California in the 1970s.

Sorry to not agree with everything, but...

In my part of the county (Washington DC area) White-Japanese marriages were kinda common. White-Chinese marriages were rare. And (from what I learned in sociology class later in college)that was because of prejudice from the minority directed outward, not from the majority White population towards the minority(Whites are equally prejudiced/nonprejudiced towards Japanese and Chinese alike because they cant even tell the two groups apart). Chinese-American culture is more hostile to marrying outsiders. Japanese Americans were more open to mixed marriage. And men of my dads generation often had had "war brides" from both Europe and Japan. So White-Japanese mixes were fairly common among kids my age.

I call for not ceremonially awarding anything to anybody.

If the conversations we had were accurately depicted in film today oh my god.