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The 29th Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG Awards 2023) were held on Monday, with the film ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ winning four major awards and breaking the record for most wins for a single movie. Fans were elated over the film getting its due recognition after the recent snub at the BAFTAs, which took place earlier this month. Despite the laurels, what raised eyebrows was actor Mark Wahlberg presenting the award for the best ensemble to the predominantly Asian cast of the film — a move that netizens slammed, considering Wahlberg’s hate crime history with the AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) community.
For the unversed, people’s fury stems from an April 1988 incident in which the actor, a 16-year-old at the time, hit a Vietnamese man in the head with a wooden stick while trying to steal alcohol, making the man unconscious. The same day, he punched another Vietnamese man in the face while trying to avoid the police. Reportedly, the police said that he made a series of anti-Asian racist slurs to describe both the victims.
Following the incident, the actor was sentenced to two years in jail but only served 45 days before he was released. In 2014, he applied for a pardon for the assault, saying that he was “deeply sorry” for the assault. A couple of years later, he dropped the appeal and told The Guardian in a 2020 interview that he had opened up to his mistake. “I took it upon myself to own up to my mistakes and go against the grain and not be a part of the gang anymore — to say that I was going to go and do my own thing. I would hope that people would be able to get a second chance in life,” Wahlberg said at the time.
As such, following his SAG Awards 2023 presentation, several users took to social media to call out the Awards for having the actor present an award to the mostly Asian cast of ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ in light of these incidents.
“I gotta say, having Mark Wahlberg, who literally went to jail as a teen for committing a hate crime against a Vietnamese man, present an award to the cast of Everything Everywhere All At Once was certainly a choice,” a user wrote.
https://twitter.com/willowhalliwell/status/1630045171390853120
Another tweeted: “Will Smith ostracized while Mark Wahlberg get to present an award to an Asian cast. #SAGAwards2023”
“Mark Wahlberg (who’s committed multiple hate crimes including against asian people) giving sag ensemble prize to a predominantly asian cast is genuinely such an embarrassing thing for hollywood to do,” a user wrote on the microblogging site.
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