Home ›› 10 Mar 2023 ›› Show Biz
As a teenager, Shirley Kurata worked in the Aratani Theatre in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles. On Sunday, the venue will host an Oscars watch party for her film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” -- and she could be one of the winners.
Kurata is up for her first Academy Award for best costume design for the mind-bending sci-fi fantasy, for which she dressed Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis.
“It feels like coming full circle,” Kurata told AFP in an interview ahead of the Oscars gala.
“I’m so honored. I’m in the company of just very, very amazing and talented costume designers.”
Kurata is competing against three past winners -- Catherine Martin (“Elvis”), Ruth Carter (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) and Jenny Beavan (“Mrs Harris Goes to Paris”) -- and four-time nominee Mary Zophres (“Babylon”).
Dressed in a vintage floral jacket and skirt, a turtleneck (her wardrobe staple, she says) and neon green jelly shoes with purple soles, Kurata rocks a retro style, complemented by distinctive round glasses.
On her pastel blue fingernails? The zany googly eyes seen throughout the film.
“Everything Everywhere,” directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, goes into Sunday’s ceremony as a frontrunner with a leading 11 nominations including for best picture.
The movie tells the story of a Chinese American couple that runs a laundromat, is in trouble with the tax authorities and struggles to relate to their depressed lesbian daughter.
At the IRS office, Evelyn (Yeoh) and Waymond (Quan) are suddenly thrust into a battle spanning multiple universes -- against a sassy all-powerful villain who happens to be one version of their child.
Kurata, whose parents also owned a laundromat, felt her collaboration with the Daniels, as the directors are known, was a “match made in heaven.”
“I think they encouraged me to sort of just show my creative muscles,” she recalled.
