LOS ANGELES — Song Kang Ho, one of the stars of “Parasite,” cried on the Oscar stage. The film’s director, Bong Joon Ho, smiled and giggled.
“Parasite” made Academy Award history on Sunday night by becoming the first foreign-language movie to win best picture. Its victory was a testament to the near universal praise for the film — a sharp contrast with last year’s winner, “Green Book” — and for Bong, who became a beloved figure as he enjoyed all the trappings of the awards season.
“I feel like something will hit me, and I will wake up from this dream,” he said backstage, with two of the four Oscar statuettes won by the film grasped in his hands like barbells.
For the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Bong’s dream is something it has been working to make a reality for several years, ever since being stung by the humiliation of the #OscarsSoWhite outcry.
“We are so proud of the academy,” Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the former president of the organization, said during an interview at the Governor’s Ball, the academy’s official after-party. “We have talked for a couple of years now about acknowledging the brilliance of filmmakers from all around the world and paying attention to their storytelling, to their visions, to their creativity. Tonight we saw it happen.”
Since 2016, following two straight years in which no actors of color were nominated for Oscars, the academy has been working to diversify its voting base: by race, gender and nationality. According to an analysis by The Hollywood Reporter, 39 percent of the organization’s new members hail from outside the United States.
Last summer, the academy invited 842 people from 59 countries to become members, including the Korean New Wave director Yim Soon-Rye (“Little Forest”), the “Parasite” cinematographer Hong Kyung-Pyo and the South Korean documentarian Hong Hyung-Sook (“Reclaiming Our Names”).
The academy invited 928 people from 59 countries to become members the previous year, and 774 people from 57 countries a year earlier.
In contrast, at the start of the decade the academy was inviting fewer than 180 people annually to become members, with most of the invites going to people already working in Hollywood. The academy only invited 105 people to join in 2008.
Yet the effect on Oscar voting had not been all that pronounced. The academy was criticized this year for yet again not nominating any women in the best director category. The majority of the best picture nominees skewed heavily male and heavily white. And of the 20 individuals nominated in the four acting categories, only one, Cynthia Erivo, was black. No one from the “Parasite” cast was nominated.
Then came the big night for “Parasite,” which triumphed over more traditional films — like “1917” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” — with its distinctive examination of class relations as seen through the lens of two intricately linked families.
“We’re not only celebrating ‘Parasite,’ but how a foreign movie just won best picture, the biggest award,” said Choi Woo Shik, who played the son of the central family in the genre-defying film. “It opens up the windows for foreign cinema lovers, and this means a lot to us.”
Last year, the Netflix film “Roma,” a family drama set in Mexico, was nominated for best picture and won best director for Alfonso Cuarón. On Sunday night, some observers were giving it credit for paving the way for “Parasite.”
“Five years ago, ‘Parasite’ would have never won best picture,” said the producer Mark Johnson, who is an academy governor and ran the foreign-language committee for close to two decades. “The idea that a foreign-language film was seen by enough people to win is extraordinary.”
Still, there was something special about “Parasite” from its initial debut at the Cannes Film Festival back in May, where it nabbed the coveted Palme d’Or. That helped propel the film to its $130 million international box office, before it came to the United States and collected an additional $35 million.
Miky Lee, the heiress-turned-media mogul who financed and distributed “Parasite” through her role as vice chairwoman of the Korean media conglomerate CJ Group, has seen the film 18 times. “The first time I watched it, I thought the low-income people are parasitic to the high-income people,” she said in an interview at the Governor’s Ball. “I watch it a second time and realize that they are parasitic to each other. This is something that affects everybody, how to coexist with respect and without crossing the line.”
Also contributing to the movie’s success was Neon, the indie film company that distributed “Parasite,” and its spirited campaign, academy governors said. The studio, led by Tom Quinn, turned awards journalists into evangelists by opening its doors wide to them, in contrast to the more controlling larger studios. On the trail, “Parasite” became draped in an almost irresistible narrative: the little engine that could.
What Neon lacked in resources — Netflix, for instance, has 60 people in its awards and talent department campaigning for films like “The Irishman” and “Marriage Story” — it made up for with buoyancy and heart.
Bong wandered through the season with his camera in tow, documenting his unlikely journey and returning some joy and excitement to a process that has been overrun with cynicism and commercialism. He became pals with the “Jojo Rabbit” writer-director Taika Waititi, and showed reverence to the filmmakers who came before him, like his competitors Martin Scorsese (“The Irishman”) and Quentin Tarantino (“Once Upon a Time”). He was a perfect character for voters to get behind.
“Bong is fresh and new in town,” Boone Isaacs said. “Though we’ve all known about his talent for quite awhile.”
The internet, Bong said, also helped make voters, and audiences in general, open to a wider range of content. “There are streaming services, YouTube, social media,” he said backstage. “We will come to a day when a foreign-language film winning this won’t be much of an issue, hopefully.”
Yet those who have seen the academy embrace inclusion at times, only to seemingly reverse course, remain skeptical. Spike Lee, who last year nabbed his first Oscar for his adapted screenplay for “BlacKkKlansman,” one of a record seven black Oscar winners that year, told The New York Times earlier this year: “After last year’s ceremony, I said, ‘It ain’t gonna be like this next year!’ It’s always feast or famine with us.”
When asked Sunday night at the Governor’s Ball if he thought the victories by “Parasite” made up for the lack of diversity in other parts of this year’s Oscar race, Lee wouldn’t bite.
“The struggle continues,” he said.
Kyle Buchanan contributed to this report.
Source : Nytimes
