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| Bong Joon-ho |
Parasite's brilliant win is a portent of change in the conceited Hollywood club
The Academy has finally caught up with the outside world – its task now is to avoid returning to its insular ways
Peter Bradshaw
Monday 10 February 2020
A
fter years of upholding the values of mainstream-prestige dullness and having cultivated a habit of rewarding mediocrity and conformity, the Oscars have made a bold and brilliant choice. Hooray for the good taste of Hollywood. Best picture, best director and best international feature have gone to a movie that really deserves it, a film from beyond the Los Angeles parish pump. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite from South Korea is the stunningly clever and powerful upstairs-downstairs satire of a predatory family moving into a wealthy household, and in so doing revealing the dual dysfunction of both the master and servant family groups and the unhappiness of wider society, disclosing a new 21st-century serfdom.
