Weighing Parasite’s Wins
As the shock begins to wear off, critics, industry watchers, and actual movers and shakers within the business are beginning to sort through the implications of the history-making wins for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite at the Academy Awards on Sunday night. Bong and Han Jin-won’s Oscar for best screenplay was the first ever to be presented to a film from South Korea. The best international feature award was certainly deserved, but as Rolling Stone’s David Fear points out, many Parasite fans feared that it would turn out to be “a consolation prize of sorts, the type of we-love-you-but-stay-in-your-lane message that voters gave to Roma last year.” But then Bong won best director and the evening was capped off with the first best picture Oscar for a film in a language other than English. “The steady, stealthy victory of Parasite,” writes Slate’s Dana Stevens, “was a movie in itself, complete with plot twists, drama, laughter, and tears: a thrilling mashup of genres, just like a film by Bong Joon-ho.”
And then there was the extraordinarily well-orchestrated campaign. After Parasite won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, it disappeared from western eyes for a time while it cleaned up at the box office in South Korea. It wasn’t until the fall that the film began to emerge on the festival circuit in North America, and then, all along the march through awards season, we began to be introduced to the team. Producer Miky Lee is, as Rebecca Sun points out in her profile for the Hollywood Reporter, an “heiress turned media mogul whose $4.1 billion entertainment empire serves as the foundation of much of the country's cultural output, from television dramas streamed by millions of viewers worldwide to K-pop concerts packing arenas around the globe to movies dominating the box office in Asia and, perhaps soon, farther west.”
Bong’s interpreter, Sharon Choi, has charmed millions. She’s a filmmaker herself who’s currently developing a screenplay rumored to be set against the backdrop of an awards season campaign. E. Alex Jung has introduced Vulture readers to production designer Lee Ha-jun and the team that built that architectural wonder of a house. And of course, we’ve gotten to know more about Bong himself. “The effect of Bong’s personality on this Oscar race cannot be underestimated,” writes Jessica Kiang at the Playlist, adding that “the whole Parasite crew are utterly endearing, but they orbit Bong, and he has managed to walk the exact right line between being dazzled and humbled by all the attention and being quizzically, sometimes almost caustically amused by it.” And Slate’s Sam Adams adds that “Bong might not have expected to win, but he acted as if he belonged.”
Credit, too, has to be given to Neon, Parasite’s distributor in the U.S. “Will there be a very foolish attempt by Hollywood to chase every single foreign-language film known to man, as it spends gazillions of dollars and pleads that it can make all of them into the next Parasite?” asks Neon’s Tom Quinn in his conversation with IndieWire’s Eric Kohn. “Sure, that’ll happen, and that’s great. I love that. But every movie is its own film, and every release plan is unique to that film. We released this film the way that Cinema V released [Costa-Gavras’s] Z [in 1969]. That was our model, that was our goal. And it still worked.”
