A Thai won an Oscar - did we forget to mention that?

It wasn’t quite the star-studded selfie that Ellen DeGeneres snapped at the Academy Awards, but Fawn Veerasuntorn’s “self-portrait with Oscar” certainly went viral in Thailand after she posted it on Facebook. More than a thousand “likes” were the swift reward for Fawn, one of three Thais who worked on Walt Disney’s “Frozen”, which was voted Best Animated Feature Film.
Fawn has every reason to be proud and scores of Thais and expatriates have every reason to express their delight for the story artist who works for Disney in Burbank, California.
Fawn graduated from Mahidol University and then furthered her studies at Columbus College of Art & Design in the US, soon moving into professional storyboarding, character animation, illustration and, yes, filmmaking. Sharing the Oscar glory are visual-development artist Sunny Apinchapong and effects apprentice Rattanin Sirinaruemarn.
It took a moment more for the local mainstream media to catch on that an actual Thai had won an actual Oscar. Now they’re all after her for an interview, and Soopsip is no exception. It would be great if Disney could set up a video conference so we can all get a better look at Fawn and her colleagues without, you know, coughing up a lung on airfare.

Ad teeters on the fence

Yuenyong “Ad Carabao” Opakul wrote the song “Khon Lobe” (“Greedy”) nine years ago and, although some people heard it as a blast at Thaksin Shinawatra, Ad maintained that it was only about, you know, greed. Certainly no one is mentioned by name in the lyrics.
But now a person using the probably fictitious moniker Anonymous has posted a video online that really does blast Thaksin and has the song as its soundtrack. So here we go again. Ad is under siege from left and right. Some might say he’s being torn between two lovers. They’re definitely fighting over him.
This person from the anti-government side puts the video out, so a red shirt calling himself Krisanapong goes on Facebook to claim Ad had phoned him to reconfirm that the song was not an assault on Thaksin. Krisanapong also declared that Ad is a red shirt at heart – he just can’t say so publicly because if would cause serious career (income) damage.
Next up, and again online, musician Payat Phoowichai retorted that Ad insists he sides with no particular political group. Payat says Ad believes it’s best to “write and play songs for people” without ever appearing on a protest stage – because that’s not the way to solve the country’s problems.
Avoiding protest stages is easier said than done in these conflicted times, of course, and certainly Ad and his band, Carabao, have never shied away from political insurrection in the past (at least not until they branched into the lucrative but studiously neutral energy-drink business).
But Ad’s neutrality might fail the sustainability test. How many times will he need to be reminded that he wrote a campaign song for the Pheu Thai Party’s Pongsapat Pongcharoen in the last Bangkok gubernatorial election – but also used to sing onstage in support of the Democrat Party? Once again we’re left wondering whether, if these are “songs-for-life”, whose life are we talking about, and are they meant to last a lifetime?