The 94th edition of the Academy Awards were held last Sunday night. Someone who is known in the Star Wars community won a very special award.
What's Happening:
- Troy Kotsur won best supporting actor for CODA.
- He had also invented the Tusken Raiders' sign language.
- It is exciting for anyone who wins an Academy Award, but it is even more of a milestone for Kotsur because he is the first deaf male actor to win an Oscar.
- He was also the first deaf actor to appear in a Star Wars project when he played one of the Tuskens in Chapter 5 of the Mandalorian.
- He is credited in Chapter 1 of The Book of Bobba Fett as the creator of Tuscan sign language.
- Kotsur spoke to the Daily Moth earlier in 2022 about his Star Wars fandom and talked about why he decided to invent a brand new language for Tuskens.
- He said that he has been a Star Wars fan since he was eight years old, despite the fact that accessibility for deaf people was rather limited at the time.
- He shared: “Eight years old! I have been a fan since that age. Remember that in the year of 1977, technology was limited and accessibility for Deaf people were limited, but that Star Wars movie blew my mind. It changed my life. Why? It was like ‘wet-eyes’ – so visual for me. For the first 5 minutes, remember the opening of that movie? The spaceships shooting, the robots, C-3P0 scrambling, and all of that overwhelmed my eyes. I watched it 28 times. I watched the movie Star Wars: A New Hope 28 times.”
- “I did research on the culture and environment of Tusken Raiders. I researched on the desert called ‘sand people.’ That is what Luke Skywalker calls them ‘sand people.’ Anyway, my goal was to avoid ASL. I made sure it became Tusken Sign Language based on their culture and environment.”
- You can see the video below of when he won the Oscar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52tjGGy5iqY