A piece on extending the conversation about diversity at the Oscars to include all minorities.
Oscar turns 75 this year, old enough to write a second volume of its memoirs. The Academy Awards are always called Hollywood's Prom Night, and like all prom nights they inspires a lot of memories and photographs and scrapbooks, and sometimes you go rummaging through them.
On the morning of the day when he won the Academy Award, Dr. Haing S. Ngor was a busy man. Just after dawn, outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, he was clicking off TV interviews, one after another: "A.M. Los Angeles," "Good Morning America." The fans in the bleachers, who had waited all night huddled in their sleeping bags, chanted "Haing! Haing!" He waved to them like a kid at his first prom.
LOS ANGELES -- "Here is a woman," Oliver Stone said, "who goes through the entire roulette wheel of experience. She hits every ticket on the wheel. She's a rich man's mistress, she's a peasant, she's a traitor, she's a spy, she's a beggar on the street, she's a Vietnamese prostitute, she's an American housewife, she's a businesswoman, she has three different children with three different men."
Los Angeles, California -- Early on the morning of the day that he would win the Academy Award, Dr. Haing S. Ngor found himself in the middle of the annual Oscar media circus. He was sitting in a director’s chair outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, sipping tea under a gloomy sky, trying to ignore the fans in the nearby bleachers, who were chanting his name. He had already been in terviewed for TV stations in Boston and New York, and now he was going to do the “A.M. Los Angeles” program before being followed around all day by a crew from “Good Morning, America.”