Surprises really can come true.I wrote an entire post yesterday about the obstacles Parasite had to overcome to win best picture, but sometimes, Hollywood does the right thing.
Instead of celebrating itself, sometimes Hollywood just chooses the best damn movie that got made. And this may be the first ever that had zero to do with Hollywood.
Yeah, Bong Joon-ho has made films that were primarily in English with big Hollywood stars, and he also had a deal with Netflix, though I guess that was just for one movie. But the movie that won him not one golden statue, but four, was the one exclusively in his native tongue, starring exclusively actors with his own skin color.
And it became the first ever best picture winner in a language other than English.
It's really astonishing.
For me, it marks only the third time my #1 movie of the year has been named best picture, as Parasite follows on the heels of Titanic (1997) and Birdman (2014).
As Bong kept getting up again, and again, and again, and kept finding ever more charming ways to express himself, I wondered if his translator was ever going to get stressed out about him going on too long for her to be able to reproduce all the words he'd said. And who knows if she did or not. The subject of this post notwithstanding, I don't actually speak Korean.
But for one night, Hollywood did. Hollywood said "Screw all these try-hards who are producing the type of movie they think we want to recognize. What we want to recognize is quality."
And for one night, they did.
As I like to do every year after I finish the Oscars, watched on delay here in Australia, I'm going to throw in some general thoughts and bullet points about the show, having not read any recap stories and having no idea if these thoughts are original to me or if I'm just the 403rd person in your Twitter feed to release them into the world. Of course, I'm not in your Twitter feed, but you get what I'm saying.
So, here goes ...
- At first I didn't think I knew who either of the singers were in the opening number, which made me feel old. But after a few moments I said to my wife (who was still watching at this point, and continued to do so for exactly two awards), "I think that's Janelle Monae." Whew! Less old. But I still didn't know who the other guy was. (His name is Billy Porter, which I might have known if I watched the TV show Pose.)
- Why did Brad Pitt and Al Pacino both decide to wear their hair like lion manes? There were other options.
- I thought it was kind of a weird decision to present the Oscar for best animated feature before best animated short. But they did the same thing with the documentaries so at least they were consistent.
- I thought the Frozen II song with all the foreign language singers was a good choice, especially with how the evening ended up winding down. And that all the jokes about Idina Menzel landed.
- Parasite wins best original screenplay! There's something happening here ... what it is ain't exactly clear.
- What the hell was Timothee Chalamet wearing? If it was a non-binary outfit, then I rescind my befuddlement.
- Taika Waititi wins best adapted screenplay? That could actually be the biggest surprise of the night.
- The show was pretty flat, I thought, before Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig came out. I thought they loosened things up.
- I thought the best documentary winners might thank the Obamas. They did not.
- For some reason I thought that Laura Dern had already won an Oscar. When I realized she hadn't, it made me even less worried that my girl Florence Pugh did not take home the statue. She will take home at least three in the future.
- I don't really get the reason for the Eminem song but at least it was well performed. I imagine it took a lot of good directing to get people on camera who had the right reaction to it. Unfortunately, at one point they also got Martin Scorsese.
- I figured Eminem might be the one to drop an f-bomb, but instead, it was Ray Romano. Ray Romano??
- Randy Newman looks old. But he can still perform.
- The recap rap by Utkarsh Ambudkar was tight, and probably my favorite segment in the whole show.
- Will Ferrell and Julia Louis Dreyfus were the best comedy duo. Everything they did worked, including the confusion over whether they were wearing earpieces or not.
- Was Cynthia Erivo dressed as an Oscar? I knew she could sing from Bad Times at the El Royale, but I didn't know she was also a songwriter. Talent.
- I groaned when James Corden and Rebel Wilson came out dressed as cats, but it was appropriately self-deprecating, and the bit with them playing with microphone was great, though I suspect unrehearsed -- it looked like Wilson was planning to get on with reading the winner and had even started speaking when Corden had a moment of inspiration.
- Bong said he was ready to get drinking, which was great, but he still had two more awards to accept.
- Kellie Marie Tran wins good sport of the evening by showing up to introduce a presenter and seeming like she was genuinely having a great time and not burdened by great psychological baggage over the way she's been treated. The producers returned the favor by including her multiple times in the clips that played over John Williams' nominated score. I hope she has a terrific life, whether in front of the cameras or not.
- I thought it was very strange that Joker was scored by a woman. Maybe Todd Phillips doesn't hate them after all?
- As the show neared the end, it became more and more clear: The Irishman is the only best picture nominee that is not going to win anything.
- Bong honoring the other directors was touching and lovely, and I didn't envy him that he had to figure out how to say something nice about Todd Phillips.
- Wait, Joaquin Phoenix didn't win an Oscar for Gladiator? How have I thought he did for the past 20 years? (Benicio del Toro did for Traffic that year.) Okay, not so upset about that one either. Especially after he gave one of the most interesting and impassioned Oscar speeches I've ever heard, even though I was prepared to cringe at any moment if he went off the rails into insanity.
- The only thing that tainted the win by Parasite, and only ever so slightly, was the fact that the final set of speeches was pretty discombobulated in comparison to what Bong had given us before then. Jane Fonda seemed unsure what she was supposed to do. And by the way, how the hell is Jane Fonda 82 years old? She looks 62.
- This BP winner gets us back to rhyming following two years in which the streak was broken. You had Spotlight, then Moonlight, now Parasite.
- Was there not a single winner played off the stage by the orchestra this year?
After this triumph, the Oscars can give top honors to five Green Books in a row and they'll still have this to fall back on.
Well done, Academy. Pat yourself on the back.
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