From post-apocalyptic bullet trains to adorable GMO super pigs, director Bong Joon-ho’s repertoire of films reached a momentous occasion at this year's Academy Awards. Parasite cleaned house, winning not only the much anticipated Best International Film but Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture. With so many wins after contending with a year’s worth of star-studded and controversial Western releases, many media outlets may have been just a bit too eager to report that Bong had tied Walt Disney‘s record with four individual Oscar wins in a single night.
However, there is a small, lesser-known technicality. According to People, Best International Film is awarded to the country submitted for entry, not the individual director. That would leave Bong at three “individual” wins, with his fourth win of Best International Film going to South Korea, meaning his haul falls just short of Disney's record of four individual wins at the 1953 Oscars.
The record-keeping is beside the importance of Bong’s victory. Parasite made history as the first-ever non-English language film to win Best Picture, a category that has been dominated by English-speaking, Western released films. The precedent of Parasite’s win may usher in a new wave of international Oscar potential, and very well may force filmgoers to rethink how language should and shouldn’t matter in the craft.
This isn’t Bong’s first film to challenge the confines of Hollywood’s language barriers. The 2017 Netflix original Okja featured a stellar English and Korean speaking cast of Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, Steven Yeun and the breakout Seo-hyun Ahn. Language and its ability to become lost in translation played a darkly comedic plot point in the film when Yeun’s character, a militant animal rights activist, failed to properly translate English to Korean for the film’s heroine Mija, played by Ahn.
Bong’s Hitchcockian style often focuses on themes of the haves and have-nots and the social and class injustices that follow. While some of his previous films may be more bombastic and science fiction in nature, such as the dystopian class-warfare of Snowpiercer or the abuses of the corporate food industry in Okja, Parasite took a more intimate look at the disconnection between the upper and lower class.
Following a disenfranchised family living in South Korea as they con an aloof wealthy family into giving them high-paying service jobs, Parasite took the film circuit by storm with its unexpectedly intense third act. More importantly, Bong’s auteur hit captures the bizarre dissociation of the fabulously wealthy and the extreme lengths one would go to lift themselves out of poverty in a way that is so concise, its relatability should transcend any language barrier.
Of course, Bong Joon-ho’s win this week didn’t tie Walt Disney’s record win decades ago. But such a minute statistic shouldn't deter from the importance of Parasite’s wins. Instead, Bong’s storytelling ability to transcend cultural and language divides should be enough to make the Academy redefine the parameters of the Best International Film award. After all, the category was formally titled Best Foreign Language until 2019, which of course is a shortsighted categorization of international film.
Moreover, is it fair for the award to be given to the submitted country rather than the individual director? When so many of Bong’s themes center around class injustices and social discourse, no matter how fantastical they are, it should cause the Academy to question if the Best International Film award should be given to a country whose government fails to uplift the voices and identities a work portrays.