Parasite director Bong Joon-ho had a hugely successful night at the 2020 Oscars, equalling a long-held Academy Awards record set by none other than Walt Disney. Bong Joon-ho has long been an acclaimed filmmaker, but 2019’s Parasite has brought him further into the mainstream than ever before. The South Korean comedy thriller became the first Korean movie to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival, and Parasite’s $167.5 million box office gross makes it the highest grossing Korean movie of all time. However, it’s the awards season circuit and build-up to the Oscars where it’s really generated a lot of buzz.
Parasite became a firm favorite this awards season, which is in large part because of its astonishing quality, but also helped by the charm, humor, and warmth of director Bong Joon-ho. That’s now been rewarded by the Academy Awards: the Oscars 2020 winners were well spread out among a variety of films, but Parasite was undeniably the big winner on the night. The movie somewhat surprising claimed both Best Director and Best Picture, and in doing so put Bong’s name into the record books.
Parasite won four awards in total, which alongside Director and Picture included Best International Film and Best Original Screenplay. Four awards for a single movie is impressive, although not record-breaking (that number still stands at 11, managed by Ben-Hur, Titanic, and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King), but four awards for an individual is. Because Bong Joon-ho didn’t just direct Parasite, but also co-wrote and co-produced the movie, that means he personally was the winner of four Academy Awards in a single night, something only Walt Disney has ever done before.
Walt Disney’s own historic night came way back in 1954, at the 26th Academy Awards, which gives an indication of how stunning a feat this is for Bong to accomplish. Making it even more impressive is that Disney’s four wins didn’t come from just a single film: The Living Desert won Best Documentary; The Alaskan Eskimo won for Best Documentary Short; Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom won for Best Short Subject (Cartoon), which is now the Best Animated Short category; and Bear Country won for Best Short Subject (Two-Reel), which is now the Live-Action Short category. Other filmmakers, such as Peter Jackson and James Cameron (for the aforementioned Return of the King and Titanic) have won 3 in a single Oscars night, but only two have reached 4.
There is admittedly a caveat to Bong’s success, which is that Best International Film, unlike other awards, technically goes to the country as opposed to an individual, which would make that South Korea’s win rather than Bong Joon-ho’s specifically. However, since 2014 the director’s name has been engraved on the statuette alongside that of the country, which means that Bong does have his name on four different Oscars from the same night, and he went up on stage to receive them all too. Given Disney was an Oscars powerhouse (no individual has won more than his 22 (plus four honorary)) who still needed four movies to achieve such a record in one night, it’s quite remarkable that Bong Joon-ho has done so for Parasite, a film not in the English language.
Next: Oscars 2020: The Biggest Snubs & Surprises
