Dress Circle | How Parasite’s best picture triumph alters the character of Oscars

A Korean film has become a world sensation. The dark comedy thriller Parasite achieved the rare feat as the first non-English language film in Oscar history to win the award for Best Picture. The award is just one of the many firsts scored by Bong Joon-ho. It had won the coveted Palme d'Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first South Korean film to do so, and the first film to win by unanimous vote since the French lesbian romance Blue Is the Warmest Colour directed by Abdellatif Kechiche in 2013.

Parasite is being released worldwide and widely reviewed. So, we would not gloss over it or critique it in this column. Instead, we will look at how the Oscar will impact Hollywood and make the Academy a truly inclusive space. That the Academy considers only Hollywood films for their marquee award categories has been an accepted norm all these years. Parasite trumping the frontrunners from Hollywood is good not only for the diversity cause within the United States but also for all filmmakers and professionals across the world who make outstanding films in various languages.

The Academy has been criticised for promoting one type of culture and narrative – that of white Americans – in the categories. Diversity, at best, has been a token gesture in the awards. Blacks, women, LGBTQ, non-American ethnic communities and minorities have been complaining of inadequate representation in the industry and awards. These communities have come to believe that they have been deprived of an opportunity to contest for the Oscars, which is regarded as the top honour in the world.

While talking about Parasite’s win, we cannot help mentioning the movements that work towards bringing diversity into the filmmaking process. Take ‘Inclusion rider’ for example, which was a positive intervention into film contracts as contracts are the last word in deciding who are hired by the studios for the various roles on and off the screen. The term “inclusion rider” came into prominence after actress Frances McDormand mentioned it in her 2018 Oscar acceptance speech. After the #MeToo scandals, the industry was widely painted black for its systemic predation of women. It has always been facing the heat for the exclusion of people of colour. Inclusion rider attacked both these problems through a contractual obligation that actors and filmmakers could sign up to increase diversity in the auditions that they conduct to find the right crew for their films.

April Rein, who had created the world-trender hashtag #OscarsSoWhite wrote in Variety about diversity and representation in Hollywood: “Of the black actresses who have been nominated for best actress or best supporting actress, the vast majority play women dealing with trauma: women in abject poverty, women who were enslaved, or women who were subservient to others.” This explains only part of the problem. Women, particularly women of colour are discriminated against in the hiring process for a film’s crew. The objectives stated in the Inclusion rider template make sure that representation and ensuring diversity must not come in the way of the creative process of filmmaking and objectivity in selection.

Coming back to Parasite, the best film honour and the multiple awards that it won surprised many because it is a perfect antithesis of the dominant Hollywood template that the Academy has been promoting through awards--that of the white American macho male. The swanky production values aside, Parasite represented a culture that is not too familiar to the audience that Hollywood catered to. This is a departure from the over-representation of romantic historical epics, biographical dramas, romantic dramedies and family melodramas among the nominees all these years. The storytelling too, was heavily dependent on dark humour weaved around urban poverty and class divide. Asian films in general and Koren films in particular are quite popular in the West but almost all of them are dark thrillers or acrobatic martial arts films. The only other Asian film to have received the best film nomination before Parasite was Ang Lee’s wuxia fantasy action film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The honours at the Oscars are decided every year by popular vote done among the 7,000 members of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), a professional honorary organization. According to a study conducted by the Los Angeles Times, the demographic breakdown of approximately 88% of AMPAS' voting membership showed that 94% of the were Caucasian (whites), 77% were male, 33% of voting members were former nominees (14%) and winners (19%). Data from Academy Awards since 1929 shows that the non-white nominees have been a mere 6.4% and it showed a slight improvement to 11.2% since 1991.

Such a skewed composition aside, intense lobbying using professional publicists and a huge war chest and whisper campaigns to malign competing films have become accepted practices in the run up to the awards. Add to this, the fact that there is no guarantee that the members get to watch all the competing films before voting. It is against these odds that a Korean film trumped all the American nominees and reached the top. The Academy deserves praise for voting almost unanimously to promote cultural diversity by selecting the best from across the world disregarding the tradition of the awards. It’s history being rewritten.

(Dress Circle is a weekly column on films. The author is a communication professional and film enthusiast. Read his past works here.)