Sean Wang made a home movie. Now, he and his grandmothers are going to the Oscars

The 29-year-old filmmaker Sean Wang can't believe it, himself, but he's going to the Oscars with his grandmothers

NEW YORK -- Sean Wang’s two grandmothers live together. They read the newspaper together. They dance together. They sleep in the same bed and complain about each other’s farts. The older of the two, Yi Yan Fuei, is 96. The younger, Chang Li Hua, is 86. They’re in-laws but they act more like sisters.

When Wang, their 29-year-old grandson, was getting into filmmaking, one of the first he made was a short where Yi and Chang feed him blueberries. When Sean refuses, they kill him and bury him in the backyard.

Wang kept shooting them in their Bay Area home, especially after he moved back in with his nearby mom during the pandemic. They got accustomed to his camera being around. But they never thought it would lead to the Academy Awards.

“Wài Pó and Nǎi Nai,” Wang’s deeply charming portrait of his grandmothers, is nominated for best documentary short at the Academy Awards. In it, Wang films Yi and Chang going about their daily lives with bits of playfulness mixed in. They arm wrestle. They play dress-up. They watch “Superbad.” But mostly, “Wài Pó and Nǎi Nai,” which translates as maternal grandmother and paternal grandmother in Mandarin, captures the joy of two spirited ladies in older age as they occasionally chide their grandson’s attempts to turn them into movie stars.

“When you first asked us to be movie stars, we were like, ‘This must be a joke,’” Chang says in an interview by Zoom alongside Yi, with Wang joining from Los Angeles. “But now that we made this movie and it’s going to the Oscars, we do kind of feel like movie stars. Now that this whole experience has happened, we do feel a little prettier.”