This Asian woman creates history at Oscars 2021! Wins top award

Oscars 2021: The 93rd Academy Awards saw history being made! An Asian female director Chloe Zhao clinched the Best Director award for her film Nomadland. The movie tells the story of a financially stretched van dwellers in the US recession-era. It also received the Best Picture category award. 

China-born filmmaker Zhao also becomes the second woman director to get the Oscars in this category. In 2010, Kathryn Bigelow took the prize for the war thriller ‘The Hurt Locker.’ 

Lately, the acceptance towards the Asian movies has increased as this year Minari, Nomadland scored hugely at Oscars, like last year, as South Korean director, Bong Joon-ho became the first non-America director to win the Best Director award for the movie Parasite.  

The 39-year-old Zhao featured real-life nomads alongside actress Frances McDormand to show the lives of older Americans who travel from job to job trying to scrape together a living. McDormand bagged the Best Actress category award in Oscars 2021 for Nomadland. 

Zhao has already picked up trophies from the Directors Guild of America, the Golden Globes, BAFTA, and multiple film critic groups for Nomadland. Alongside Zhao, the other directors nominated for this category were Thomas Vinterberg for Another Round, Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman. Lee Isaac Chung for Minari and David Fincher for Mank. 

For the first time in the Oscars history, two women were nominated in the Best Director category at the same time. She competed for this year against ‘Promising Young Woman’ director Emerald Fennell 

Earlier, she has won acclaim for independent movies ‘Songs My Brothers Taught Me,’ about the bond between a Native American brother and sister, and ‘The Rider,’ the story of a young cowboy recovering from a serious head injury. 

Zhao, who was born in China and lived in Beijing until age 14, went to boarding school in London and finished her high school in Los Angeles.