Movies

SEOUL, South Korea — Much of the world knows South Korea by its cultural products, including its increasingly popular movies, TV dramas and K-pop performers like BTS and Psy. Now the country has received once-unthinkable validation of its artistic achievement: a best-picture Oscar.On Monday, the director Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite,” a genre-defying film about class warfare, won that award and three other Oscars, including best director. It was a historic moment for both the Oscars and South Koreans: “Parasite” was the first ever foreign language film to win the top Academy Award, and for South Korea, it was a moment of collective national pride.In office buildings in downtown Seoul, where people were watching live streams of the awards ceremony, cheers rang out on Monday morning. The South Korean president kicked off his staff meeting with a round of applause for the director. Local media sent out news flashes.“‘Parasite’ wins four Oscars, including best picture, and rewrites the 92-year history of Oscars!” read a banner news alert on the home page of the national news agency, Yonhap.South Koreans expressed surprise and gratification over the honors.“Frankly, I haven’t had high expectations because I thought they made conservative choices when selecting Oscar awards,” said Baek Young-hoon, 50, a South Korean movie fan, referring to the longstanding dominance in Hollywood of white filmmakers focusing on stories about white people. “So this comes as a great pleasant surprise to Korean people. We have been longing for global recognition of our movies at the Academy Awards.”“Bong Joon Ho and his ‘Parasite’ made me proud of being Korean,” said Kim Ki-nam, 28, a seller of smartphone accessories in Seoul, calling it a “Korean film winning an Oscar with an all-Korean cast and with a Korean tale!”As soon as “Parasite” hit the screens last May, it resonated with South Koreans because it used a masterful mix of comedy, satire and violence to describe one of the country’s biggest social and political issues: widening income inequality and the despair it has generated, especially among young South Koreans.“People around the world could relate to the polarization it describes,” said Huh Eun, a retired college professor in Seoul and a fan of Mr. Bong’s films. “The film was an extended metaphor for how the deepening rich-poor gap in advanced capitalist societies breeds blind hatred and crimes.”In the movie, a poor family living in a stifling semi-basement home uses subterfuge to get various jobs from — and feed off — a rich family in Seoul. Hence the movie’s name.The film touched nerves among South Koreans because of its depiction of the squalor and exorbitant housing prices the poor face in the country’s congested capital city, and the deepening fatalism among the have-nots over their inability to climb the social ladder.The gap and alienation between the so-called gold spoon and dirt spoon fueled a recent scandal involving the country’s justice minister, who was accused of using his influence to help his children get into prestigious colleges. The minister, Cho Kuk, resigned after weeks of public uproar, and President Moon Jae-in apologized to young South Koreans over the country’s growing economic inequality.Mr. Bong’s film proves that a story that examines the struggles of ordinary South Koreans could strike a chord around the world because of the inequalities that afflict many societies.“Miracle!” Woosang Lee, a Korean in Vancouver, Canada, wrote on Twitter. “I am happy and proud to be Korean. I have never imagined that this kind of thing would come.”Another Twitter user said it “feels surreal to see a movie in your first language earn this much prestige from a Western audience.”The Korean Peninsula was divided into North and South Korea by foreign powers against the Koreans’ will at the end of World War II. That history left both Koreas with a deep fear of being ignored.Although South Korea has transformed itself from a war-torn economic basket case into one of the economic powerhouses of Asia, it still nurses a perpetual hunger for international recognition. One of the country’s pet grievances remains that its scientists and writers have yet to win a Nobel Prize.In South Korea, athletes, artists and entertainers have been looked down on as pursuing inferior professions. Mr. Bong was among hundreds of artists, writers and filmmakers who had been deemed uncooperative and blacklisted by the government under a former president, Park Geun-hye, who was impeached.But it was South Korean athletes, filmmakers and other artists who helped put South Korea on the map by winning Olympic gold medals and professional golf trophies and by going viral on global social media with K-pop music, videos and films.South Korean films have won awards in major international festivals since 2002. (“Parasite” itself won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May and the Golden Globe for best foreign film last month.)But until now, an Academy Award had proved elusive.“It’s a little strange, but it’s not a big deal,” Mr. Bong told an interviewer last year, when asked why no Korean film had ever been nominated for an Academy Award despite the country’s outsize influence on cinema over the past two decades. “The Oscars are not an international film festival. They’re very local.”On Sunday night in Hollywood, the Oscars were local no more.In Seoul, word of the honors for Mr. Bong was celebrated by everyone from the American ambassador to President Moon, who started his presidential staff meeting on Monday with a clapping of hands for the director and “Parasite.” He later thanked Mr. Bong for “instilling pride and courage in our people.”“‘Parasite’ has moved the hearts of people around the world with a most uniquely Korean story,” he said. “It reminds us of how touching and powerful a movie can be.” More

Joaquin Phoenix capped off a strong awards season by winning an Oscar for his performance in “Joker.” This was his first Academy Award and fourth nomination. After he took the stage, he gave an emotional speech and riffed on several topics, including oblique references to meat-eating, past mistakes and forms of societal inequality.[embedded content]Here is the full speech:Hi. Stop. Hi. God, I’m full of so much gratitude right now, and I do not feel elevated above any of my fellow nominees or anyone in this room, because we share the same love, the love of film and this form of expression has given me the most extraordinary life. I don’t know what I’d be without it. But I think the greatest gift that it has given me, and many of us in this room, is the opportunity to use our voice for the voiceless. I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the distressing issues that we are facing collectively and I think at times we feel or are made to feel that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality. I think whether we’re talking about gender inequality or racism or queer rights or indigenous rights or animal rights, we’re talking about the fight against injustice. We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender or one species has the right to dominate, control and use and exploit another with impunity.I think that we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world and many of us, what we’re guilty of is an egocentric worldview, the belief that we’re the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal. And I think we fear the idea of personal change because we think that we have to sacrifice something to give something up.But human beings, at our best, are so inventive and creative and ingenious and I think that when we use love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and to the environment. Now, I have been — I’ve been a scoundrel in my life. I’ve been selfish, I’ve been cruel at times, hard to work with and ungrateful, but so many of you in this room have given me a second chance and I think that’s when we’re at our best, when we support each other. Not when we cancel each other out for past mistakes, but when we help each other to grow, when we educate each other, when we guide each other toward redemption. That is the best of humanity. I just — I want to — when you — when he was 17, my brother wrote this lyric. He said, “Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow.” Thank you. More

The Oscars are now an ensemble production.Last year, after the fiasco of Kevin Hart’s dropping out as host after a backlash against his history of homophobic jokes, the Oscars went stag to its own party. The broadcast was brisk and entertaining, the ratings for the hostless event rose and the awards show decided to leave the post vacant.This can work, as it did last year, especially with clever set pieces and some awards-magic serendipity. But one thing a host can do is give the broadcast a shape and a voice when nothing else provides them.And this year’s show seemed to feel the vacuum more, turning out a grab bag of emotional high moments and perplexing uses of time.The hostless show opened with Janelle Monáe donning a Mister Rogers cardigan and belting out a medley with backup dancers and lyrics that rhymed “Parasites” and “Dolemites,” followed by a quick, hit-and-miss joint monologue by former hosts Steve Martin and Chris Rock. (“This is such an incredible demotion!” Martin marveled.)Ditching a host can help the show run on time (this one did not, and not only because of Joaquin Phoenix’s extended argument for veganism). It can leave room for unscripted awards moments. But it loses one of the functions of the awards show host in recent years: to be the elephant-in-the-room pointer, the joker, lowercase, who acknowledges the industry’s failures and embarrassments.In this case, the Oscars’ most noted offscreen controversy — the glaring whiteness and maleness of many of the major categories and movies — didn’t get quite the airing an extended monologue might have delivered.The collective did get in a few shots. Rock jibed that Cynthia Erivo, nominated for playing Harriet Tubman, must have hidden all the black nominees, while Monáe said, “We celebrate all the women who directed phenomenal films” (something the best director nominations pointedly didn’t).This anarchist collective of a ceremony ended up being a sort of anthology of mini-shows, hosted by a string of presenters. Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig won Best Audition for a Future Awards Show, nailing a tight a cappella duet medley themed to the best costume design category. James Corden and Rebel Wilson, in costume from “Cats,” spoofed the uncanny-valley horror of that movie: “Nobody more than us understands the importance of good visual effects.”There was also a string of questionable choices, starting with a bizarre Russian-doll approach in which several of the presenters were introduced by their own presenters. (The show did recognize that some stars, like the musical guest Elton John, needed no introduction.) There was, for some reason, a musical recap of the program halfway through, rapped by Utkarsh Ambudkar.In another puzzling musical decision, Eminem performed “Lose Yourself,” his nearly two-decade-old rap anthem from “Eight Mile.” (He followed a film montage, which followed an introduction by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who followed an introduction by Anthony Ramos. It was quite a journey.)It may have worked in the room, and in the living rooms of viewers who still have the song on their workout playlist. But energizing the show with nostalgia for a 2002 soundtrack feels a little passive-aggressive toward the movies of 2019.The ceremony was most effective when it simply got out of the way of its stars’ shine. Erivo burned down the house with a performance of “Stand Up,” from “Harriet” (for which she was also nominated as an actress). There was a meltingly tender Hollywood family moment when Laura Dern shared her first Oscar, for supporting actress in “Marriage Story,” with “my acting heroes, my legends, Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern.” And last year’s best actress, Olivia Colman, shared a side effect of winning a statuette: “Last year was the best night of my husband’s life.”At its absolute best, this Oscars succeeded with what you can’t script: great artists being recognized, and recognizing others. The room exploded for the surprise best-picture win for “Parasite,” the class-conscious film from director Bong Joon Ho.When Bong collected the best director award earlier in the evening, he saluted Martin Scorsese and the other nominees in the category, saying through a translator: “I would like to get a Texas chain saw, split the Oscar trophy into five and share it with all of you.”Then he switched to English to sign off: “Thank you. I will drink until next morning.” A sentiment that, at the end of a long and formless awards show, plenty of us can also share. More

Ninety-two years of Oscar history were shattered Sunday night when the South Korean hit “Parasite” became the first film not in the English language to win the Academy Award for best picture.The class-struggle thriller faced stiff competition for Hollywood’s top trophy from movies that included Quentin Tarantino’s showbiz epic, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” the billion-dollar comic-book film “Joker” and Martin Scorsese’s Netflix crime drama, “The Irishman.” But “Parasite,” directed by Bong Joon Ho, managed to pull off the final win in a moment that had audience members in the Dolby Theater leaping to their feet.The historic victories made front-page news in South Korea, where Baek Young-hoon, 50, a Seoul office worker and avid Bong fan noted, “The South Korean movie industry became 100 years old last year, and this is a momentous event that makes South Koreans proud.”In honoring the film, which also won best director, original screenplay and international feature, voters managed to simultaneously embrace the future — Hollywood’s overreliance on white stories told by white filmmakers may finally be ebbing — and remain reverential to decades-old tradition: Unlike some other best-picture nominees, “Parasite” was given a conventional release in theaters. It has taken in $35.5 million at the North American box office since its release in October. Global ticket sales stand at $165 million.“We never write to represent our countries” a beaming Bong said through a translator, as he accepted the screenwriting Oscar with Han Jin Won.The film’s seismic win came in wake of the #OscarsSoWhite protests in 2015 and 2016 that forced Hollywood to examine its systemic sidelining of minorities. Humiliated by the outrage that followed its failure to nominate any minority actors for Oscars at the time, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences vowed to double minority membership by 2020. In 2015, about 8 percent of the academy’s 8,500 voters were people of color. The percentage of minority members now stands at roughly 16 percent.The comedy-thriller seemed to touch a nerve wherever it played, thanks to its tale of have-nots outsmarting the haves. At least that’s how it seems at first, when the struggling Kim family uses a variety of subterfuges to get jobs working in the household of the wealthy Park family.The cast included Bong’s frequent collaborator Song Kang Ho as the impoverished patriarch, but the lack of nominations for any of the film’s stars renewed criticism that the academy frequently overlooks Asian actors. Indeed, the best-picture win for “Parasite” was in keeping with tradition in one respect: recent best pictures set in Asia, like “Slumdog Millionaire,” won without any acting nominations.In pushing for more diverse voting ranks, the academy greatly expanded its foreign contingent, a necessity because Hollywood remains so overwhelmingly white and male. Last year, the academy invited 842 film industry professionals to become members, with invitees hailing from 59 countries. About 29 percent were people of color.The celebration of “Parasite” follows a year in which Oscar voters seemed to retrench toward their conservative past. In a choice that prompted immediate blowback — from, among others, the director Spike Lee, who threw up his hands in frustration and started to walk out of the theater — the academy gave the 2019 best-picture Oscar to “Green Book,” a segregation-era buddy film. While admired by some as a feel-good depiction of people uniting against the odds, the movie was criticized by others as woefully retrograde and borderline bigoted.Without the victory for “Parasite,” it was a rather poor year for inclusion at the Oscars. The academy barely avoided another #OscarsSoWhite debacle by nominating Cynthia Erivo (“Harriet”) for best actress. (She lost to Renée Zellweger for “Judy.”) Once again, all of the nominees for best director were men, despite it having been a banner year for female filmmakers.With the awards for “Parasite,” Oscar voters slowed the rise of Netflix, which entered the night with a field-leading 24 nominations but left with only two prizes (for supporting actress Laura Dern in “Marriage Story” and the documentary “American Factory”). That was a rebuke, perhaps, to the streaming giant for spending a sultan’s ransom to campaign for votes and for largely bypassing theaters with its films. Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” relentlessly hyped by Netflix as “one of the best films of the decade,” went zero for 10.Many pundits figured the best-picture Oscar would go to the war drama “1917,” which had amassed the most significant trophies until now, including a Golden Globe for best drama and the top prizes from two major industry guilds, the Producers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America. The last film to score with all three of those groups but still miss out on best picture was “La La Land,” which fell to “Moonlight” three years ago on Oscar night.Still, “Parasite” had shown impressive strength all season, and not just at the box office. The movie won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the Golden Globe for best foreign film last month, the Writers Guild Award for its original screenplay, and a best-ensemble prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards — the first time in its history that the performers’ organization had given its top trophy to a foreign-language film. At that ceremony last month, the “Parasite” actors received a standing ovation when they came out to present a clip from the film, a sign that passion for the twisty thriller ran deep.Bong, whose credits include “Okja” and “Snowpiercer,” proved to be one of the season’s most popular presences: a Golden Globes party touting “Parasite” even drew well-wishers from competing films, like the “Once Upon a Time” star Leonardo DiCaprio and the “Marriage Story” writer-director Noah Baumbach.“We never expected all this,” Bong said then. But now that “Parasite” has made Oscar history, it’s clear that traditional expectations should be thrown out the window. In a post-“Parasite” world, the best-picture winner can come from anywhere. More