Oscars So Local

In 2019, Bong Joon Ho, the South Korean director of recent Best Picture winner Parasite, said in an interview that “the Oscars are not an international film festival. They’re very local.” Of course, soon after his interivew, Parasite took the Oscars by storm with 6 nominations and 4 eventual wins, dominating the February award show with wins in major categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best International Feature, and Best Original Screenplay. Parasite was the first non-English movie to win the Best Picture honor, symbolic of the Oscars' recent shift towards more internationalism and diversity. Indeed, historically the Oscars have had a reputation of being monolithic and focusing on the stories of a select few Americans. Bong's reference to the Oscars as local was preceded by the #OscarsSoWhite movement that spotlighted the lack of minority representation in Oscar nominations and membership. Correspondingly, I believe that it would be interesting to analyze the demographics and geography of the Oscars' awards over time, to see if there was a broader context of diversification that accompanied Parasite's historic win.

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