Make room, Emma Stone.
Step aside, Colman Domingo.
Two endearing, fun-loving grandmas from Fremont — 86-year-old Chang Li Hua and 97-year-old Yi Yan Fuei — could well upstage you and any other celeb hitting the red carpet this Sunday as part of the 96th Academy Awards.
Already, this formidable dynamic duo have won the hearts of the many who’ve watched them horsing around and going about their daily business in the Academy Awards-nominated documentary short, “Nǎi Naii & Wài Pó,” streaming now on Disney+.
The heartwarming short captures the antics of these rascally roomies (they share a bed at night) as well some of their reflective moments, via a video camera in the able hands of their beloved grandson Sean Wang.
The 30-year-old filmmaker shot the short in 2021 when he returned home for a few months after living in New York and before he returned to Los Angeles, where he had attended college at the University of Southern California. He had an amazing time, he said, hanging out with them, just as he has in the past.
“I think whenever we’re together, it’s this overwhelming feeling of joy and silliness and this child-like youthfulness that they bring and that they bring out in me as well,” Wang said during a Zoom interview.
But there’s a twofold reason why the Fremont native made “Nǎi Naii & Wài Pó,”– one to showcase the joy while expressing his love for them and secondly in response to the rash of anti-Asian hate crimes happening around the Bay Area and the nation, which accelerated during COVID-19.
“That juxtaposition of extreme anger coupled with extreme joy – just hanging out with them – it just made me want to turn the camera on them and capture their humanity, capture the essence of who these two women were in my life that really humanizes them and help them feel seen.”
They have been the focal point of Wang’s videos before when he was younger. In his teen years, the skateboard-loving Wang shot, cut and edited numerous skateboard videos amongst others and uploaded them to YouTube – setting the stage and giving him an education leg up for his future career.
Wang lives in Los Angeles now and is excited to be accompanying his maternal grandmother (Wài Pó) and his paternal grandmother (Nǎi Naii) this Sunday. Previously they hit the red carpet at the annual Oscar luncheon, held Feb. 12 in Los Angeles.
The grandmothers have been basking in all this attention and even become quite the celebrities in and around their East Bay neighborhood. (The video of their jubilant reaction along with Wang and others to the Oscar nomination further increased their visibility, and also went viral.)
“They love it,” he says, adding it wouldn’t feel right to him about making the short if they weren’t enjoying the before, during and after. “You should have seen them at the (Oscar) luncheon. They were like celebrities. They were walking the red carpet like they’ve done this a million times.”
Wang should start preparing to be walking red carpets in the near future. To say it’s been an exciting, whirlwind year for the filmmaker whose resume includes making shorts at Google Creative Labs, would be an understatement.
In addition to the Oscar nomination, Wang’s delightful feature debut “Dìdi (弟弟)”– a semi-autobiographical coming-of- age dramedy about a 13-year-old Tawianese-American skateboarder and the growing pains he experiences in 2008 Fremont – nabbed three awards after its Sundance Film Festival world premiere and then got picked up for distribution by Focus Features. It’s slated for a July 26 release in movie theaters, and stars breakout actor Izaac Wang, Joan Chen and also features Chang Li Hua as the main character’s grandmother.
It was natural to set and film “Dìdi” in Fremont, he said.
“It was both creative and logistical. From a logistical standpoint our movie is so homegrown. It’s so local, and I really wanted to bring in the Bay Area where I’m from,” he said, adding he wanted to film at his friends’ restaurants, the skate parks he hung out in and so on.
“I had never really seen that version of the Bay Area portrayed in movies and I think our movie, if we’re lucky, is in conversation with the canon of Bay Area movies that have come before it, and I was inspired by it.”
Just like the grandmothers and Wang himself, the city of Fremont has been basking in the cinematic spotlight of late. Last year saw the release of another Sundance hit, Babak Jalali’s droll B&W immigrant drama “Fremont.”
Wang seems understandably dazed by all the good news of late.
“It’s surreal,” he said. “It’s amazing. It’s…I clearly don’t have the words,” he said. “I think the common thing between both projects is that they were made with so much love…with so many of my closest collaborators and best friends. And so to have our films get this sort of attention is amazing because I think we really do love the movies and we care about the movies and we about the people in the movies.
“And so just to have it all happen at the same time – like process getting nominated for an Oscar – is crazy.”
Come Sunday night, it might even get more crazy for Wang.
