cynical Oscar nomination for a man...guess they forgot this one

One of the reasons that a lot of people are cynical about the woke casting in Hollywood is that they are casting people who lacked talent, or were not as experienced and hadn't paid their dues in the acting business (e.g. the woke lady casted as Snow White...neither beautiful nor luminous on screen, making lots of folks quip they'd prefer the evil queen played by the luminious Gal Gadot) 

 That is why a lot of folk who think giving an Oscar nomination to a man who is a trans woman in a role in a film that no one ever saw is something big.

not answered: Is he a good actor, or is it a woke nomination that lets him steal an Oscar from more deserving actual women?

Just wondering. I haven't seen him in a movie.

  

But it isn't a breakthrough Oscar nomination: 

Linda Hunt won an Oscar for playing an Indonesian male photographer in the Year of Living Dangerously.

  LINK:

35 years ago, when Peter Weir embraced the spirit of the title The Year of Living Dangerously and hired an American woman to play a Chinese-Australian man in that political drama, his gamble paid off: Linda Hunt became the only person to win an Academy Award for playing a cisgender character of the opposite sex. It wasn’t an easy decision. The filmmaker had asked a fellow Australian David Atkins to take the role of dwarf Billy Kwan in the drama about expats in Indonesia during the 1965 coup attempt. But Atkins didn’t click with the movie’s star, Mel Gibson, during rehearsals. “Sets were being constructed in Manila, and the clock was ticking,” Weir recalled in a recent email. “The casting agent said he had a possible Billy Kwan called L Hunt. He then revealed he was a she. We were desperate and gave her a try, and she was great.”

Linda Hunt in ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’ in 1983 (Rex)

 an excerpt from the film:

of course, in today's world, casting a person of European ancestry as an Asian would be a no no.

Full movie here.

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the coup portrayed in the film was in response to an attempted communist take over, or maybe instigated by the CIA, or maybe just Indonesians killing the prosperous Chinese living there, or maybe the Muslims killing the pagan or Christian Chinese community under the name of killing communists.

Brittanica article has lots of details.

or read Wikipedia, who of course would never be biased (/sarcasm):

Deaths 500,000 : 3 –1,500,000+ 

Perpetrators Indonesian Army and various death squads, supported by the United States, the United Kingdom and other Western governments

Motive Anti-communism, Indonesian nationalism, revenge for the 30 September movement, Sinophobia, Islamic extremism

Lots of fog of war. 

Backstory: the Chinese diaspora are the Jews of SEAsia: They run the stores and much of the economy and didn't intermarry with locals or follow the same religion (being pagan or Christian in a Muslim majority country). So they were ethnically cleansed by Muslim Nationalists in the Indonesia coup, not just by the government but spontaneous pogroms. 

this ethnic hatred is because they run the economies and so locals can't get ahead.

This hatred of the ethnic Chinese merchant class was not just in Indonesia of course: many of the second wave boat people in VietNam were Chinese ethnics purged by the new communist government.

In the Philippines, a law makes it impossible for foreigners to own things, so in the past, many of the Chinese merchants married local ladies, and their descendants run the government. But there is still a lot of prejudice against the local Chinese community here.

Something to remember when you read about the Chinese merchants behind the expansion of Chinese influence all over the world.