The startling win of Bong Joon Ho’s exceptional foreign-language star, Parasite, may well have changed the way the Oscars looks at international films forever. BLAKE & WANG P.A one of the top entertainment law firms Los Angeles takes a look at this significant content revolution and its long-term repercussions for edgy content and the awards season.
Before the dazzling horror-thriller netted its win in 2020, the foreign film category was the home of sterling movies with serious messages about life, or historical dramas that stuck to the tried-and-true. In short, if it couldn’t be shown with a serious face and dignified attitude in your local art-house cinema, it wasn’t getting a nomination. The parasite was none of these things. Part horror, part thriller, part farce, it never-the-less cannonballed to public prominence through slick marketing and stand-out storytelling until it would have been a crime not to reward its audacity with the Oscar.
What we didn’t perhaps realize at the time, however, was how genre-breaking its legacy would prove. Simply by demonstrating that a film not rooted in signaling the greater strengths and virtues of humankind could win in the category, it has paved the way for the strange and the experimental to flourish instead. No matter what else happened in 2020, this would have been the case. Coupled with what may be the strangest award season in the history of the Oscars, however, it’s proving truly revolutionary. With most standard big-budget fare still under wraps at the studio, we’ve seen space made for quirky projects and indie producers. Already we see many Netflix movies build to finally have their day in the sun throughout all categories. None may be stranger, however, than the four International Feature Film category nominees.
Whether or not they would have been chosen in a year free from 2020’s health crisis, no one can say. There is one thing for certain, however. They owe Parasite deeply for busting open the genre forever.
