For years now, some pundits have made the case that the Academy Awards are no longer relevant. For a long time, winners have been fairly easy to predict, thanks to the Academy’s obvious preferences. Best Picture has almost always gone to American live-action features that reach a certain level of prestige and have had at least moderate success at the box-office, yet so many Best Picture winners, such as Dances With Wolves, American Beauty and Crash, have floundered in reputation over the years.
Aside from the ceremony itself existing as a chance for Hollywood to celebrate itself and an opportunity for industry networking, it’s questionable whether the Academy Awards truly have any lasting merit these days. This year however, something surprising happened, and a little subtitled film from South Korea called Parasite happened to win.
Bong Joon-ho’s darkly humorous social-thriller took home the Academy’s highest honor this year, as well as the Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, Director and International Film. Bolstered by its historic win, Parasite immediately saw exponential financial gain. In the following week, the film made $8.8 million in American theaters, the best box-office boost a film has seen from a Best Picture win this past decade. That week alone made up 20 percent of its American gross, bringing the domestic tally to $44 million, which is a highly impressive intake in the States for a subtitled film. Parasite also saw a surge in its overseas profits, making $12.7 million abroad this past week, and its worldwide ticket sales are now projected to be at $204 million.
While Parasite has been available for home viewing since January, following its awards season success, the American distributor of the film, Neon, expanded its release to around 2000 theaters in North America. This was the widest release for a foreign film since 2004’s Kung-Fu Hustle. “It’s a great win for ‘Parasite,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Comscore. “This example can put to rest the notion that streaming and the big screen are adversaries.”
Bong Joon-ho himself has been vocal about his hopes that Parasite will encourage American audiences to seek out other great international films that they may have missed. As he accepted the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, Joon-ho said, "Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films." His words are, perhaps, a bit ridiculing towards the American public, but it truly is a shame to consider that, for many, it may be a fact.
While there have been a handful of subtitled pictures that have performed well in the U.S. (i.e. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Passion of the Christ), studios still regularly see heavy use of subtitles in a film as hurting its chances at box-office success. Parasite, however, perfected the tricky maneuver of being both accessible and contextually rich, and its layered material has encouraged multiple viewings.
To be fair, Oscars success has given films additional box office success in the past before. Moonlight, The Artist, and The Green Book all saw box office lifts after they won Best Picture, with the latter seeing the biggest post-Oscar upswing before Parasite took that title this year.
What differentiates Parasite’s Oscar victory is that it may very well act as an artistic catalyst. Not only has the increased attention made the film more financially successful, but it will likely inspire other filmmakers (both foreign and domestic) to work on more idiosyncratic yet universal films, as well as encourage other people to seek out more great films that aren’t in their native language. In this way, it seems that the Oscars do matter, but more importantly, Parasite unquestionably does.