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SUDOKU

WHISPER

“More sun 
please.”
“I like the 
chonky 
squirrels!!!”

WHISPER

Wednesday, February 8, 2023 — 3
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

The paper takeout pail: the 
compact, usable, portable rom-
com–iconic vessel for rice. You 
open the metal purse handle-
like top and a plume of smoke 
steams out from the origami 
folds, revealing a poof of palate-
cleansing flavor and soft white 
morsels.
Takeout restaurants every-
where deliver rice, and only 
steamed rice, in a folded paper 
box, often featuring a red pago-
da and a “thank you.” The box 
makes it easy to dig in with 
chopsticks or smoothly slip a 
puff of rice onto a plate to soak 
up the rich flavors of a main 
dish (this week, No Thai! green 
curry). Fresh white rice can 
also slide from its container to 
serve as a canvas for toppings 
from around the world: beans, 
dill, tomato and onion, sweet 
coconut milk and daal. And, 
though delicious alone, com-
forting, mild and filled with 
feel-good carbs, white rice left-
overs lie lonely in the white box 
in the back of the fridge.
You forget the underrated 
(yet irreplaceable) dish as it 
solidifies into a grainy block, 
wasting money and food. But 
if you fry it up, you can create 
a special single-pan meal that is 
brand new every time.
Fried fresh white rice turns 
to mush. But when chilled, rice 
starches undergo a firming pro-
cess called retrogradation. Fry-
ing chilled rice creates firmer, 
crispy morsels that are dry 
enough to soak in a delicious 
egg. The egg plumps the grains 
and crisps the dish on the sides 
of the pan.
Eggs, a golden ingredient and 
critical “cheap” protein, face an 
ongoing shortage and soaring 

prices. Yet, as is typical in the 
pitfalls of a college kitchen, we 
waste precious money on favor-
ite ingredients that we forget to 
use. Especially now, when they 
are at their most scarce and 
treasured, we should use eggs 
to reinvigorate the underap-
preciated golden ingredient of 
leftover rice.
The earliest days of eggy 
fried rice were in Emperor 
Yang’s ancient Sui Dynasty 
kitchen. The newly populated 
city of Yangzhou, China, crowd-
ed with recent immigrants, 
quickly caught on to redeeming 
the hardening staple starch, so 
as not to waste precious ingre-
dients and to combine many fla-
vors into a single dish.
Fried rice quickly caught on 
in Asian American restaurants, 
suiting the American-assimilat-
ed cuisine with salty, craveable 
flavor. And when Americans 
got plain white rice from their 

favorite restaurants, fried rice 
became a staple leftover.
Since most college students 
can’t fit a wok in a micro-kitch-
en’s false wood cabinets, a fried 
rice feast is unfeasible. The 
countless ingredients, from the 
traditional additions of scallops 
or sausage to American takeout 
peas and corn, can hardly fit in 
a small frying pan. So I “rec-
reated” a base for an untradi-
tional, soft yet crisped leftover 
delicacy.

Ingredients

1 
cup 
days-old 
chilled 
steamed white rice
1-2 eggs (if you’re feeling 
rich)
1 dash neutral oil or cooking 
spray
½ tsp garlic powder
1 ½ tbsp soy sauce or tamari
½ tsp sesame oil or sesame-
based marinade

½ tbsp chili-based hot sauce
½ tsp sweetener of choice
½ tsp acid: lemon or rice vin-
egar
¼ tsp ground ginger

Instructions

Put neutral oil in the pan and 
scramble 2 eggs with ½ tbsp 
soy sauce and ½ tsp garlic, fry 
at medium heat until eggs are 
just raw on the top.
Put rice into the pan with 
a dash more oil and scramble 
ingredients 
together, 
letting 
rice clump
Whisk together remaining 
ingredients and spices into a 
sauce.
After 1 minute, pour the 
sauce all over the eggy rice.
Reduce heat slightly and stir 
in the rice, let it fry for a few 
minutes.
Serve topped with your favor-
ite vegetables or condiments.

Ingredient Column: The forgotten, cold, leftover 
takeout white rice
Breaking down this year’s 
Oscar nominations

The final stretch of awards 
season is upon us as the Oscar 
nominations were announced 
last week. It’s a surprisingly 
good crop of nominees given 
the Oscars’ history of reward-
ing mediocre to straight-up bad 
movies. The Academy of Motion 
Picture Arts and Sciences seems 
to have found the right balance 
of critical and commercial hits to 
recognize. Here is a breakdown 
of the major categories and some 
of the trends and narratives sur-
rounding them:
Best Picture
The Best Picture nominations 
this year were fairly predict-
able — Gold Derby correctly pre-
dicted nine of the 10, only “The 
Whale” missing out in favor of 
Palme d’Or winner “Triangle of 
Sadness” — but it struck a bal-
ance of prestige and blockbust-
er that allows the Academy to 
both maintain its standing as a 
respectable awards body and bol-
ster television viewership. Among 
the nominees are festival hits like 
the aforementioned “Triangle of 
Sadness,” Venice Film Festival 
debutants “Tár” and “The Ban-
shees of Inisherin,” and Toron-
to International Film Festival 
People’s Choice Award winner, 
“The Fabelmans,” and runner-up, 
“Women Talking.” The Academy 
also nominated the two most suc-
cessful films of the year — “Ava-
tar: The Way of Water” and “Top 
Gun: Maverick” and smaller hits 
“Elvis” and “Everything Every-
where All At Once.” The Netflix 
adaptation of “All Quiet on the 
Western Front” rounds out the 
group of 10 after a big showing at 
the BAFTAs where it picked up 14 
nominations.
This race should come down 
to three films: “EEAAO” is the 
current favorite — garnering 11 
nominations, the most of any film 
this year, and doing well on the 
awards circuit so far. “Banshees” 
is also a contender, reaching a 
much wider audience after com-
ing to HBO Max and receiving 
much acclaim. “The Fabelmans” 
could take the “CODA” path to 
victory, taking advantage of the 
ranked-choice voting system as a 
film universally liked.
Best Director
Whether Best Picture and Best 
Director go to the same film is a 
toss-up. “Parasite” and “Nomad-
land” each won both awards in 
2020 and 2021, but director Sian 
Heder (“CODA”) wasn’t even 
nominated last year for her Best 
Picture-winning film. It’s gen-
erally a good bet that the Best 
Picture winner will at least be 
nominated for Best Director, 
which means “The Banshees 
of Inisherin,” “EEAAO,” “The 
Fabelmans,” “Tár” or “Triangle 
of Sadness” will likely take home 
the top prize. The nominations in 
this category went almost com-
pletely as expected, apart from 
the shocking inclusion of Ruben 
Ӧstlund for “Triangle of Sad-
ness.” Going into the nomination 
announcement, Ӧstlund was the 
13th favorite to win the award, 
but he surged forward to steal the 
final slot away from more likely 
nominees Edward Berger (“All 
Quiet on the Western Front”), 
James Cameron (“Avatar: The 
Way of Water”) and Sarah Polley 
(“Women Talking”). The Dan-
iels are currently favored to take 
home both Best Director and 
Best Picture for “EEAAO,” but 
don’t be surprised if Steven Spiel-
berg takes this one. He has equal 
odds as it stands and is looking to 
take home his first Best Director 
Oscar since 1998. It would give 
the Academy yet another oppor-
tunity to honor Spielberg for his 
personal, self-reflective master-
piece, “The Fabelmans.”
Best Actor
The Best Actor nominations 

went chalk this year; all five 
actors with the best odds via 
Gold Derby were nominated. Paul 
Mescal’s nomination for his raw, 
touching performance in “After-
sun” is a wonderful surprise since 
the only potentially close replace-
ment was Tom Cruise, who failed 
to secure a nomination for his 
fine but empty movie star acting 
in “Top Gun: Maverick.” How-
ever, for a while now, this cat-
egory has been a three-horse race 
between Austin Butler (“Elvis”), 
Colin Farrell (“The Banshees of 
Inisherin”) and Brendan Fraser 
(“The Whale”). 
Fraser is currently the favor-
ite for giving his all in one of the 
worst movies of the year. Butler 
is pulling a Rami Malek (“Bohe-
mian Rhapsody”), keeping him-
self in the race by portraying an 
American icon. But Farrell gives 
by far the best performance of 
the three. He takes McDonagh’s 
remarkably complex script and 
bounces quickly and with great 
aplomb between comic and trag-
ic tones. Farrell winning would 
mean the Oscars finally getting 
the lead actor category right, 
which means they’ll definitely 
give it to Butler.
Best Actress
This race is between two 
actresses: Cate Blanchett for her 
powerful performance in “Tár” 
and Michelle Yeoh for her excit-
ing and poignant performance 
in “EEAAO.” But the interest-
ing story in the Best Actress cat-
egory is where the hell Andrea 
Riseborough came from with her 
performance in “To Leslie?” Her 
nomination wasn’t out of nowhere 
— she had the seventh-best odds 
on Gold Derby. Nor was it unde-
serving — the buzz from “To 
Leslie” viewers suggests Risebor-
ough is fantastic in the film. But 
the sudden influx of passion and 
campaigning on her behalf was 
shocking because hardly anyone 
saw this movie. “To Leslie” made 
$27,000 at the box office and is 
currently only available to rent 
online in the U.S. There has been 
almost no marketing for this film 
— I vaguely remember a trailer for 
a single screening at the Michi-
gan Theater last fall. But a strong, 
grassroots push by famous actors 
like Gwyneth Paltrow and Mia 
Farrow, manifested an Oscar 
nomination 
for 
Riseborough. 
This campaign’s success was so 
bizarre that the Academy investi-
gated whether or not it broke any 
rules, which could potentially 
have meant taking the nomina-
tion back, although there was 
eventually no wrongdoing found. 
It’s an absurd situation, but in 
terms of the awards, it doesn’t 
matter much because there is no 
way she (or anyone who would 
have taken her place) will beat 
Blanchett or Yeoh.
Best Supporting Actor
This category was all over the 
place. Everyone expected Paul 
Dano to get the nomination for 
Burt Fabelman in “The Fabel-
mans,” but it was Judd Hirsch 
who got the nod with his power-
ful, six-minute cameo as Uncle 
Boris. Brian Tyree Henry also 
came out of nowhere with a nomi-
nation for “Causeway,” the film’s 
only nomination. His intimate, 
emotional performance seemed 
to have struck a chord with vot-
ers. “The Banshees of Inisherin” 
also came in with nominations 
for Brendan Gleeson and Barry 
Keoghan, both worthy of every 
bit of praise they have received 
for their touching and funny 
performances. This category’s 
major narrative is the wonderful 
comeback story of Ke Huy Quan, 
who quit acting for decades after 
struggling to find work, but who 
gives an exciting, heartfelt per-
formance in “EEAAO.” The Oscar 
will almost certainly go to Quan, 
as he has been winning at nearly 
every awards ceremony so far.

Design by Leilani Baylis-Washington and Abby Schreck

Design by Emily Schwartz

MITCHEL GREEN
 Daily Arts Writer 

 KAYA GINSKY
Senior Arts Editor

Read more at MichiganDaily.com