EJAE Turned 10 Years of SM Rejection Into Two Oscar Wins

On March 15, 2026, at the 98th Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood, a Netflix animated film about a K-pop girl group with a secret won two Oscars: Best Animated Feature Film and Best Original Song. The film was "KPop Demon Hunters." The songwriter who wrote the winning track, "Golden," was EJAE — a Korean-American musician who, twelve years earlier, had been turned away by one of Seoul's biggest entertainment agencies after a decade of trying to become a K-pop idol herself.

The story of how she got from there to the Dolby Theatre has since become one of the most-discussed narratives in the Korean entertainment industry. And in a recent interview with KBS, EJAE reflected on the journey with a phrase that has resonated across both continents where she is now celebrated: failure, she said, turned out to be a gift.

A Decade of Training, and a Door That Closed

EJAE — born Kim Eun-jae (김은재) in Seoul in 1991 — began training at SM Entertainment at the age of 11. She spent roughly ten years at the company, going through the same intensive system that produced groups like Girls' Generation and SHINee, with the same dream that drives thousands of hopeful trainees every year: to debut as a K-pop idol.

It never happened. Around 2015, SM let her go. The label's reasoning, as later reported in Korean media, pointed to a mismatch with the company's concept direction and aesthetic standards — the kind of language that, in the idol industry, typically signals that a trainee's physical appearance does not fit a predetermined mold. EJAE did not deny or soften the rejection when speaking publicly about it. "SM's reasons made sense to me," she said in one Korean-language interview. "I didn't think negatively about rejection. There was just a point in my life when I had to accept who I was on so many levels."

She moved to New York, studied music at NYU, and began building a new kind of career through the underground music scene — writing, producing, and learning to see her own voice differently. In 2017, she returned to SM as an external songwriter and wrote the Red Velvet hit "Psycho" in approximately 30 minutes. She went on to write for aespa, TWICE, and Le Sserafim, among others. The idol career she had trained for never arrived. The songwriting career that replaced it made her one of the most influential voices in K-pop behind the scenes.

From Sample Vocalist to Oscar Winner

EJAE's involvement with "KPop Demon Hunters" began before she was cast in the film. She was initially a sample vocalist for the production — a common role for professional singers who provide early vocal references that directors and composers use to develop a character's sound. But something in her voice fit Rumi, the lead character, in a way that no casting call had produced. She was cast as the character's singing voice and eventually became the lead vocalist for Huntr/x, the fictional K-pop group at the center of the film.

"Golden," the original song she performed and co-wrote for the film, includes lyrics in both English and Korean. That was a deliberate choice. "Including Korean lyrics in 'Golden' was important," she told Korean outlet 경향신문 after the award season began. The song went on to win Best Song Written for Visual Media at the 2026 Grammys in February — the first Grammy ever awarded to a K-pop track — and then Best Original Song at the Oscars the following month.

The film itself followed suit. "KPop Demon Hunters" swept the animated film awards circuit across the 2025-2026 season, winning at the Golden Globes, Critics' Choice, and the PGA Awards, along with 10 Annie Awards. Director Maggie Kang, who is of Korean descent, became the first filmmaker with Korean heritage to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Her acceptance speech included a dedication: "I dedicate this award to Korea and Koreans worldwide."

The Night the Orchestra Cut Her Off

Not everything about the Oscars ceremony was celebratory. When EJAE and her co-writers took the stage to accept the Best Original Song award, the orchestra began playing them off before she was finished speaking. She had intended to thank her collaborators and fellow vocalists on "Golden" — Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami — but the music cut her off before she could. The moment sparked immediate backlash from the audience inside the Dolby Theatre, audible boos, and a wave of criticism in both English and Korean media.

Korean outlets described the incident as "K팝 패싱 논란" (the K-pop passing controversy), framing it as part of a broader pattern of the ceremony giving less time and space to non-Hollywood winners. EJAE said afterward what she had wanted to say: that she had wanted to thank the two women who sang alongside her and helped make the song what it was. The Oscars producers later responded to press inquiries about the decision.

Failure as Foundation

In the months since the Academy Awards, EJAE has been one of the most sought-after interview subjects in both Korean and English-language media. What journalists and audiences seem to return to most is not the awards themselves, but the arc of how she got there — and what it says about the Korean entertainment industry's approach to talent and identity.

She has been consistent in her framing of the SM rejection. "Rejection is redirection," she said at the Golden Globes, in what became one of the most widely shared quotes from the season. In her KBS interview, that sentiment was extended: the experience that had felt like the end of her dream turned out to redirect her toward the version of her career that was always more suited to her actual abilities. Writing was, as she put it, something that "felt like home" in a way that idol training never fully did.

The phrase carries particular weight in Korea, where the idol training system remains an enormously influential — and sometimes crushing — pathway for young musicians. Hundreds of thousands of young people enter it each year. Most of them do not debut. EJAE's story does not promise them an Oscar at the end of the road, but it does offer something perhaps more useful: evidence that the door closing is not always the end of the story.

What EJAE's Story Means for K-Culture

"KPop Demon Hunters" reached 325 million views on Netflix, making it one of the platform's most-watched original titles. Its Oscar wins represent a different kind of K-culture milestone from those that came before — not a Korean group performing at an American venue, or a Korean film winning at Cannes or the Oscars, but an animated story about K-pop itself being recognized at the highest level of the American film industry, with a Korean-American woman at its creative center.

EJAE has said she hopes the film shows younger Korean-Americans and Korean diaspora audiences that there is more than one way to participate in and contribute to K-culture. Her own path — from trainee rejection to global soundtrack — is among the most vivid recent examples of that possibility. Whether or not she intended to be a symbol of something larger, she has become one.

At the KBS interview, she was asked whether she would do anything differently if she could. Her answer was characteristic: she would not change the rejection. The album of her failures, she said, had become the foundation of everything that came after. That is what she meant when she said failure had been a gift — not that failure was easy, but that it turned out to be exactly the material she needed.