“Parasite,” a genre-bending South Korean film about a poor family that tricks its way into working for a rich family, won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 92nd Academy Awards on Sunday. It was the first movie not made in English to win Hollywood’s top award.
At an awards show where the big starring categories were criticized for not having enough variety, “Parasite” became the first movie to win with an all-Asian cast. It was one of only 11 movies that wasn’t in English that were up for best picture. Bong Joon-ho wrote the script and made the movie. He was also named best director.
Overall, the film Parasite won four Oscars, which was most of the night’s awards. It was a mix of drama, dark comedy, horror, and social criticism. This came as a big surprise to the top people in Hollywood, and it was a big upset in history.
The movie didn’t look at the work of famous directors like Martin Scorsese (“The Irishman”) and Quentin Tarantino (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”) or the well-known World War I film “1917.”
How Did ‘Parasite’ Made Its Way to Oscar Despite Being A Foreign Language Movie?
Even though the Oscars are often billed as a celebration of the best movies from all over the world, there’s no denying that they are very American-focused. They are “very local,” as the Korean director Bong Joon-ho put it.
Still, that doesn’t mean that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn’t try to become more international from time to time. In 2019, the prestigious Best Picture award went to Bong Joon-ho’s movie Parasite, which was neither made in the U.S. nor by someone who didn’t speak English.
It’s a big step forward, but this isn’t the first time an Oscar has gone to a foreign film. Even though Parasite’s Oscar win is a big deal in the history of the Oscars, it is not the first non-American movie to win any kind of Oscar. This award goes to the movie Marie-Louise from 1944.
What Was the First Movie From Outside the United States to Win an Oscar?
Marie-Louise is the name of a play that was written by Leopold Lindberg, Hermann Haller, and Franz Schnyder. It happened right after the terrible things that happened in World War II. In 1942, when the Germans took over France, a young girl was sent to Switzerland. Because of what she sees in her home country, she gets too close to her rich host family.
She finds it hard to believe that she will have to go home when the war is over. The movie, which was made in both German and French, was a big hit when it came out in the US in 1944. When the Oscars came around, there was a place for it in the Best Original Screenplay category.
Marie-Louise Ran Against Dillinger by Philip Yordan, Music for Millions by Myles Connolly, Salty O’Rourke by Milton Holmes, and What Next, Corporal Hargrove? by Harry Kurnitz. The words for Marie-Louise were written by Richard Schweizer.
There were a lot of American crime movies and war musicals on the list of candidates. Marie-Louise was the only one who stood out. And, against all chances, Schweizer’s script won the gold, making Marie-Louise the first movie from a country other than the US to win an Oscar.
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