(Photo Courtesy of AMPAS®)
For most of its predictably turgid “Irishman”-length running time, The 92nd Annual Academy Awards was a fairly predictable affair — tanking Oscar pools everywhere with nary an upset in sight. Until the end. When a visibly shocked Bong Joon Ho walked up to collect his Best Director trophy — his third of the evening at that stage, after Original Screenplay and International Film, you could almost hear billions of pins dropping all around the world. The award that many predicted would go to DGA Award winner Sam Mendes for 1917 had gone instead to Bong, the South Korean director of Parasite.
Anyone with a passing knowledge of Oscar voting history and metrics knew that this now meant Parasite would win Best Picture. As Oscar voting patterns go, only eleven previous Best Picture winners have done so without winning a trophy for screenplay/story or direction — and only two of those did so without any added nominations in the acting categories: Wings, the very first-ever Best Picture in 1927/1928, and the fifth Best Picture winner, Grand Hotel in 1931/1932, which holds the distinction of being the only Best Picture winner nominated in no other category. Those awards, however, may as well be ancient history. Since 1949, only two Best Picture winners failed to also win either a Screenplay or Direction trophy — Gladiator in 2000 and Chicago in 2002, both of which also won major acting awards. When Bong picked up Best Director, it was the end of the road for 1917, which had received no acting nominations and lost in both the screenplay and director categories. It could now only win Best Picture by duplicating the prehistoric feats of Wings and Grand Hotel. There was still a narrow path for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood which would have to duplicate the 2002 feat of Chicago which remains the only Best Picture since 1940 to do so with no other major awards other than a supporting trophy for Catherine Zeta-Jones. Brad Pitt’s Best Supporting Actor trophy gave Quentin a path — albeit an incredibly narrow, statistically infinitesimal hope for a Best Picture.
Needless to say, it didn’t happen for Quentin (I had predicted a win). Parasite went on to win Best Picture against all apparent odds, becoming the first-ever non-English-language film to do so, the first-ever film to capture Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film (recently renamed Best International Film), only the second Best Picture featuring a completely non-caucasian cast (after Slumdog Millionaire in 2008), the first Cannes Palme d’Or winner to win Best Picture since the very first Palme d’Or winner, Marty, in 1955 — all of it making Bong only the second Asian filmmaker to capture Best Director (after two-time winner Ang Lee), and the first-ever person to win four awards in one ceremony for a single film (notwithstanding the Academy’s rules technicalities asserting otherwise). Only Walt Disney had previously won four awards in a single ceremony in 1953, but three of his awards were for short subjects. Bong also joins an elite class of filmmakers who have managed to win the Producing/Directing/Writing triumvirate in a single ceremony: The Coen Brothers, Peter Jackson, James L. Brooks and Francis Coppola, to name some of the most famous living such honorees. Considering that it took nearly a half century for the Foreign Language Film Category to honor an Asian film (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), to have an Asian film win Best Picture less than two decades later is no small achievement.
Make no mistake, what Bong Joon Ho and Parasite accomplished was unprecedented and historic on a level that begs for some significant analysis.
What that analysis reveals, however, is that the achievement may be substantially less historic than it seems.
I have said for weeks now that those who were forecasting a win for 1917 based on its DGA (Directors Guild of America) and PGA (Producers Guild of America) victories were putting the cart before the horse. After all, La La Land captured both of the same awards just a few years ago, and lost the big prize to Moonlight. The DGA and the PGA are not reliable forecasters unless they correlate to SAG (Screen Actors Guild) and WGA (Writers Guild of America) awards as well. Given that the largest and most influential branches in the Academy belong to the actors and writers, any film that fails to win even token recognition from their respective guilds is dead in the water. Since the beginning of the SAG Awards in 1994, no eventual Best Picture has failed to receive so much as a nomination from SAG — with only one exception: Braveheart in 1995. The SAG Awards’ second year. But Braveheart, which also had no Oscar acting nominations, had the advantage of being directed by a famous actor in his directing debut – Mel Gibson – as well as a WGA Award win for screenwriter Randall Wallace. Not so for 1917, which was not directed by a famous actor, and which lost this year’s WGA award to Parasite. Furthermore, Parasite had already captured the coveted Best Ensemble award from SAG — a prize that has foreshadowed a number of recent Best Pictures, including Crash, Spotlight, Birdman, Argo, The King’s Speech, No Country for Old Men and Slumdog Millionaire. Put simply, if there is a split between the DGA and the PGA on the one hand, and SAG and the WGA on the other — place your bets on the winner of SAG and the WGA.
To any historical observer, it would have been obvious at this stage that the film capturing the hearts and minds of actors and writers was a lock for Best Picture… if not for the fact that this year that film was a Korean-language picture — and isn’t it conventional wisdom that no film can possibly win both Foreign Language and Best Picture? Won’t Oscar voters surely just pick one, and then share the wealth in the other? After all, that’s what happened to Roma and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Why would it change this year?
The answer has to do with several factors that will invariably change the Academy Awards going forward, though not necessarily in the ways the Academy may anticipate — or like. The first is that this was the most accelerated and compressed awards season in history. In an attempt to squeeze other awards shows which it blames for adversely impacting Oscarcast ratings, the Academy pushed the ceremony this year to an early February date — nearly a month earlier than where it had been for the past several years in late February/Early March. To their credit, the Academy recognized the folly of that move almost immediately after announcing it, and next year the calendar returns to a more manageable schedule. But the damage this year was already done — and with so little time to see everything and process it, voters quite likely were of a very different mind than they would have been had the season given them another four weeks of campaigning, viewing, discussing and processing. Then there’s the change in Academy membership, a massive influx of new members — the largest since the late 1960s — including significant inductees from other countries. In just three short years, in answer to former Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs’ efforts to diversify what many saw as an overly homogenous, insular membership, the Academy was almost completely transformed — so it should be little surprise that a more international voting body would, at long last, honor a foreign language film. Lastly, there’s the matter of the “preferential ballot” instituted in 2009 to stem the decline in Oscarcast ratings by bringing more — and more popular — films into the Best Picture lineup. Rather than select a single favorite from five nominees, the preferential ballot has voters rank their choices, with the winner selected based on a numerical calculation that weighs a film’s overall popularity on all ballots. This has tended to create an unusual number of picture/director splits, as well as fewer Best Pictures walking away with the most overall trophies. More significantly, however, it has not brought more commercial films into the mix, but rather more foreign and independent films, almost always at the expense of bigger studio pictures. Of the eleven Best Picture winners of the Preferential Ballot era, nine have been independent or foreign. Only two — Argo and Green Book — have been studio films. Compare that to the previous eleven years which featured five indies and six studio releases, or the eleven before that: eight studio, three indie. A decade before that: nine studio and two indie. More predictably, Oscar ratings have continued to plummet, this year reaching a record low of 23.6 million viewers — less than half the number of people who watched the Oscarcasts in 1984 and 1998 when E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Titanic were in contention.
So while Parasite will be seen as a breakthrough on many important fronts, the one front where the Academy needed a real breakthrough — a ratings recovery — this year delivered merely more of the same. That is undoubtedly painful news to many who had hoped that the 92nd Oscars represented a return to the past. For the first time since 1995, the top four nominated films were all from MPAA member companies — not an independent distributor among them (Joker from Warner Bros, 1917 from Universal, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood from Columbia and The Irishman from Netflix). This was also the first time in history that four films received ten or more nominations — and only the second time that three major studios received ten or more, the first being all the way back in 1964 when My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins and Becket accomplished the feat. Surely Best Picture would come from one of these, yes? Surely this was a renaissance moment, a return to glory for the major studios, yes? No. This was the year that three-year-old NEON, Parasite’s distributor, would win its first Best Picture — just two years after Moonlight distributor A24 captured its first Best Picture. Once again, an upstart indie would slay the studio Goliaths, and put to bed any hope for a return to the glory days the Academy so desperately needs.
Certainly, the more hopeful observers will suggest that there’s a positive side to the Parasite win in that it heralds a more international posture at the Oscars going forward. Such hopes should be tempered. In many respects, Parasite is lightning in a bottle. It was already recognized as such when it became the first-ever Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. And Bong Joon Ho is hardly an art house fixture — his 2006 breakthrough film The Host was as mainstream as any American monster movie. The dazzling English-language action sci-fi film Snowpiercer followed in 2013, with Netflix finally giving him his widest exposure for the offbeat science fiction film Okja in 2017. All are cult-favorites among genre fans. If anything, Parasite is a departure. In all likelihood, it will be a very long time before another foreign language film repeats the feat, and even then it will be an infrequent occurrence. For comparison, consider the history of the UK’s BAFTAs. A more internationalist body from the beginning, the BAFTAs awarded five foreign-language films their top prize between 1951 and 1961 (four French, one Soviet). In the 1970s, only two French films earned the top prize. In the 1980s, it was almost uniform dominance of American and British films, with only one foreign language film taking the top prize — Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette in 1987. From 1987 to the present, the only non-English-language film to capture the BAFTA has been Roma, in 2018. If the BAFTAs can go backwards in their willingness to honor foreign-language films, so can the Oscars.
If there’s an apt analogy, it might be 2011’s Michel Hazanavicius-directed The Artist, a silent, black-and-white tribute to the silent movie era made by a French filmmaker with French money. It is, for all intents and purposes, a French film. But it is not a French-language film. The odds against another Foreign-made black-and-white silent movie winning Best Picture… ever… are astronomical. Likewise, Parasite is a film of a particular moment in time which has captivated Academy voters obviously also eager to bolster their cultural, ethnic and artistic diversity credentials. But it is not and will not be duplicable.
The harsh reality to which Hollywood is now waking up — and which we at CineGods will address further in the near future — is that nothing has really changed. Attendance at American movie theaters reached another record low this year, despite the record earnings of Avengers: Endgame. Oscarcast ratings reached a new record low as well. Nothing the Academy has done to tinker around the edges, nothing that any studio has done to bolster attendance, is stemming the bleeding. Streamers like Netflix and the migration of major studios like Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal into more heavy dependence on the streaming space is rapidly changing the priorities of the companies who have traditionally filled our cinemas. General audiences are increasingly alienated from the tastes of film critics and film industry professionals. It is an unsustainable situation that will reach critical mass sooner than later. When the Parasite high wears off, the hangover will be crippling — and Hollywood will find itself facing an even more daunting landscape for the future than it has ever faced before. That future, for the time being, is not bright — and no one seems willing or able to do anything to fix it.
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