Oscars Best Supporting Actor frontrunners Dev Patel and Mahershala Ali will make history if they take home an Academy Award later this month (Feb17).
Ali was considered the favourite after winning a Screen Actors Guild award for his role in Moonlight, but now Anglo-Indian Dev has joined the front of the race following his BAFTA victory for Lion in Britain on Sunday (12Feb17).
If either star strikes gold on 26 February (17), they will make history – Dev will become the first actor of Indian descent to win an acting Oscar and Ali will be the first Muslim to win an acting Oscar.
The House of Cards star reminded Hollywood about his religious beliefs as he delivered the most emotional speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards last month (Jan17).
As the nation protested new leader Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban on people from Iran, Iraq, Syria and four other countries, Ali stood on the SAG Awards stage in Los Angeles and declared, “I’m a Muslim“, as he accepted the trophy for best male actor in a supporting role.
He fought back proud tears as he continued, “When we get caught up in the minutiae and the details that make us all different, I think there’s two ways of seeing that – there’s the opportunity to see the texture of that person, the characteristics that make them unique, and then there’s an opportunity to go to war about it and say that this person is different from me, I don’t like you, let’s battle.”
Patel has also made political comments during this year’s awards season – he criticised the glitz and glamour of prizegivings as the legal battle over the immigrant ban in the U.S. rumbles on.
“What are we doing?” Patel asked The Hollywood Reporter. “What are we doing walking these red carpets when people can’t even walk out of an airport?”
The actor was distraught people were being turned away from the U.S. purely because of their religion, just as he is being accepted in Hollywood for his culture.
“I’m at a moment in my career that I’ve worked really hard for, where I’ve been accepted for my culture, for my uniqueness,” he explained. “I’ve been pushing so hard to be embraced, and it has finally happened. While outside, in the real world, there are people being turned away from these shores and being thrown back into the conflict zones. So you’re constantly thinking, ‘What does this even matter?'”
