A sea change comes to Hollywood
Parasite — a landmark foreign film
When people in the US were not familiar with my films, Quentin [Tarantino] always put my films on his list.
It is still hard to believe. Parasite, the South Korean satirical thriller, has become the first film in a foreign language to win best picture at the Academy Awards.
A 92-year Oscar streak has been broken, an unspoken rule in Hollywood upended. A town renowned for selfobsession has done the unthinkable, and looked outwards.
With its name now etched on four statuettes — best director, best original screenplay and, naturally, best international feature are the other three — Parasite has joined Ingmar Bergman’s
Fanny and Alexander and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as one of the mostrewarded foreign-language films in Oscar history.
And yet, even those two films weren’t quite well-loved enough by the Academy to win the evening outright. But Bong Joon-ho’s film was, and did — and in the face of some exceedingly macho Oscar bait.
The widely touted frontrunner was Sam Mendes’s 1917,
a World War I film whose formulaic virtuosity might as well have been specifically designed to win awards. Then there was Todd Phillips’s comic-book adaptation Joker
— a tale of young white male rage that carried itself, very self-consciously, as a film for our moment. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time
. . . in Hollywood and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman could hardly be accused of doing that — their significant pleasures were primarily retro — but those films’ shared interest in leathery white machismo may no longer be a best picture golden ticket.
Why did Parasite win? The primary reason is that it is a very good film, but an enabling factor was doubtless the recent broadening of the gender, age and ethnic diversity of the Academy voters.
Since the #OscarsSoWhite backlash in 2015 (where all 20 of the acting nominations went to performers of European descent), the Academy has been on a recruiting spree to ensure that the industry body better reflects the business at large. Progress has been slow but steady: in 2015, women made up 25 per cent of all voters; this year it was 32. In the same time frame, the percentage of nonwhite voters has doubled, from eight to 16. Last year’s intake hailed from 59 countries.
The percentage of nonEuropean voters has gone from 6 per cent to 15 per cent since 2012. There’ve been earlier signs that tastes were shifting. Moonlight, the tale of an African American man coming to terms with his homosexuality, won in 2017.
Green Book, the (true-ish) story of pianist Don Shirley, won last year, although was criticised for telling a black man’s tale through a white man’s eyes (those of his driver). But if Green Book arguably benefited from a cynical attempt to make racism palatable to the more reactionary Academy voter,
Parasite has won on its own merits.
It is a hair-raisingly funny and ingenious thriller, stitched through with themes of real social import, of the type Hollywood itself used to excel at, but made very far from Hollywood indeed. A SouthKorean — and already leading auteur in his own country — has taken the influence of Hollywood, mixed it with his own idiosyncratic sensibility, and created something wholly original as a result.
Bong himself acknowledged his creative and professional debt to two Hollywood masters while accepting the award for best
Bong Joon-ho
director, in a speech that will surely become the definitive 2020 Oscars Moment.
“When I was young and studying cinema,” he said, “there was a saying that I carved deep into my heart, which is that ‘The most personal is the most creative’.”
Then he added in English himself:Bong Joon-hoScorsese looked genuinely touched; the room around him erupted and rose to its feet. After a moment, he went on: “When people in the US were not familiar with my films, Quentin [Tarantino] always put my films on his list.”
Tarantino was the most prominent Western champion of Bong’s 2006 monster movie The Host, and in 2009 called it one of the 20 greatest films to have been made since the release of Reservoir Dogs.
Spurred on by great American film-makers, Bong became a great Korean one, and is now recognised in America as a great film-maker full stop.