Parasite’s Oscars Impact
February 25, 2020
As the tide of award season begin to ebb, directors head home, and actors and actresses alike browse through next year’s casting. It’s important to look at the impact awards can have.
To many, an awards show is a shallow and (more than likely) rigged event, where mediocre films are celebrated, while films that are entertaining and all the more “watchable” are tossed aside. The Oscars are accused of all these things, nominating films the public has never even heard of and handing out awards to directors, actors, actresses that many feel are less than deserving. This is why the Oscars and award shows in general have tended, as the years go on and more and more beloved films and actors continued to get “snubbed,” to lose their credibility with the public.
This year, however, marked history, as Parasite, a Korean film, won the Academy Awards for Best Director, Best International Film, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture.
Many people had mixed reactions to Parasite’s big win, a more ignorant audience arguing that it is a disgrace that a foreign movie was even considered outside of the International film category; lamenting that the movie’s director, Bong Joon-Ho, shareD categories with others such as Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese; claiming that the movie is unwatchable with its use of Korean language; and imposing the burden of reading subtitles.
Others took this massive win as a stride in the right direction. Parasite is a movie that discusses the concept of wealth and the people who possess it, how money trickles down but never up, and how the real parasites are those who are so incredibly wealthy. It is methodical in each and every one of its scenes, truly one of the most powerful and beautiful movies of the decade. What’s more, it came from Korea, with a Korean director and a Korean cast speaking Korean. Basically, Parasite is a Korean movie that won Best Picture.
The wins opening so many doors for other foreign movies, which were all once limited and squeezed into one category and soon after dismissed. So many beautiful and influential movies were disregarded simply for the country they were produced in and the language that they used. This year’s Oscars showed the world that awards are not just for American movies; they sometimes go to foreign films in order to celebrate the best picture, regardless of where it came from.
