For your consideration: Parasite

Tonight the Oscars will televise -- about halfway through my workday, so around lunchtime I will stop paying attention to the interwebs and then watch them when I get home.

I don't expect a lot of surprises, but then again, can you actually expect a surprise?

A surprise I think could happen is that Parasite could win best picture. I don't expect it to happen, but then again, can you actually expect a surprise?

Maybe it won't have been such a surprise if it does happen. It feels like the consensus among critics, and even maybe among audiences, as the best and most interesting film of the year. I've written that this is the closest my tastes have aligned to the larger critical community since There Will Be Blood in 2007, though even that year, many critics felt that No Country for Old Men was the worthier selection. I don't know that Parasite has a direct competitor in the best picture nominees as far as the critics are concerned.

This, however, does not mean it has that good of a shot at winning. The critical favorite is usually the bridesmaid, not the bride, with countless examples dating as far back as Citizen Kane. More recently, films like L.A. Confidential, The Social Network and Roma are prominent instances of this, and Parasite certainly seems poised to become just the latest.

But Parasite shares something in common with Roma, and now that it has happened two years in a row, maybe the necessary critical mass is building to push it over the top.

For the second straight year, a film entirely in a foreign language has been nominated for best picture. If Academy voters were testing the waters last year with how they felt about the proposition, with Roma presumably falling just short of Green Book, maybe this year they are ready to take the plunge.

It would be an extraordinary feat if it happened. A film entirely in a foreign language has never won best picture, and looking at the list of past winners, only The Last Emperor has any significant portion of the film that's not in English. That also marks one of the few best picture nominees, and certainly winners, that has significantly Asian subject matter, a trait it also has in common with Parasite.

To get a sense of how rare both of these things are, I went back and reviewed the entire history of nominees in the best picture category. As far as I could tell, these were the only best picture nominees that did either of these things, if you don't include films that had some English, and films about Americans in Asia:

Foreign language:
The Emigrants (1972) - Swedish
Cries and Whispers (1973) - Swedish
Il Postino (1995) - Italian
Life is Beautiful (1998) - Italian
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) - Mandarin
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) - Japanese
Amour (2012) - French
Roma (2018) - Spanish

Asian subject matter:
The Last Emperor (1987)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Letters from Iwo Jima (2005)

I'm not familiar at a glance with all the movies nominated for best picture over the years -- like, really not familiar with some of them -- but I think it's a safe assumption that there were few, if any, foreign language nominees or nominees about Asia in the vast wasteland of mediocre studio pictures that were nominated prior to 1944, when the Oscars moved to only five nominees per year. But even if I did miss one or two, you get the idea about the relative scarcity of such nominees.

And even in the nominees above, some should get asterisks, such as Letters from Iwo Jima. I love that film, and I continue to think of it as having an incredibly high degree of difficulty for director Clint Eastwood, as it was not in his native language. Still, it had an American imprint on it, which certainly made it easier for Oscar voters to recognize.

Given what Parasite is up against, historically, it does make it a tall order to think of it walking away with the evening's top statue tonight. But maybe that just means it's time. Maybe these other films have reached the brink of winning top honors in order to pave the way for Parasite.

You'll notice this post has spent no time on Parasite's actual qualities as a film, the things it does that earns its status as the best film of the year. That's because I've done that elsewhere on this blog. You know I consider it worthy as I named it my #1 movie of 2019. And you've probably seen it for yourself, so you are familiar with its many strengths.

No, today I am talking directly to the Academy -- very belatedly, of course, and entirely in a rhetorical way. That best picture winner is already in that envelope ready to hand to whoever is going to read it (um, let's say that's ... Barbra Streisand. Sure, why not?). Not that my wee little blog would ever play much of a role in changing any of the minds of these people, many of whom are set in their ways, leading to predictable winners year in and year out.

But as I've said in the past few days, there are surprises, like when Moonlight upset presumed favorite La La Land to win, just a few short years ago, with many of these same voters voting.

I don't expect it to happen, but then again, can you actually expect a surprise?