A group of Asian American activists is criticizing the acclaimed movie Lost in Translation and urging Oscar voters to mark their ballots for other films. (Lost in Translation is nominated for best picture, best actor, best director and best screenplay).

Asianmediawatch.net contends that the film, set in Japan, portrays Japanese people as shallow stereotypes, and that the audience “laughs at the Japanese people and not with them,” according to a press release on a website the group has created.

I have not seen the film, but I have no doubt that in Hollywood tradition, Asians are used as a backdrop and as fodder for racist, or at the very least, insensitive jokes that milk every stereotype imaginable. Lost in Translation is just one in a long line of movies and TV shows in which Asians and Asian Americans are portrayed as, in the words of Asianmediawatch, “buffoons for the main (non-Asian) characters to ridicule.”

Asianmediawatch adroitly points out that had this film been set in Africa or Mexico, director Sophia Coppola would not have created “such an insensitive and racist portrayal of a people,” and that the movie is “indicative of a level of mainstream tolerance and acceptance of Asian American discrimination that would otherwise be unacceptable if directed towards African and Hispanic Americans.”

chinoloco