During Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh’s delightful Golden Globes monologue (it was technically a duologue, but “monologue” is what you call these things anyway), the pair joked that Crazy Rich Asians was the first studio film with an Asian-American lead since Ghost In The Shell and Aloha—a nod to the fact that both of those films actually had white women playing Asian characters. Emma Stone, who played Allison Ng in Aloha (a character who was written as part Chinese and part Hawaiian), happened to be in the audience at the Globes, and she took the shoutout as an opportunity to address the controversy for the first time in years by shouting “I’m sorry” loud enough to be heard on TV. The Los Angeles Times even got confirmation from Stone that it was her who said it, with her saying, “It wasn’t like I planned it, but I did say it.”
Now, if only NBC had actually cut to Stone when Samberg and Oh made that joke so we could see her apologizing for playing an Asian woman, it would’ve landed perfectly.