are not an international film festival. They’re very local,” Bong Joon-ho, the director of “Parasite”, a South Korean film, declared in 2019. “Parasite” went on to win four Oscars,, in 2020. It was the first time a foreign-language film took Hollywood’s top prize, breaking what Mr Bong called the “one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles”.
This year’s winners will be announced at a live ceremony on March 10th; the nominees are the most international yet. For the first time, two of the ten Best Picture contenders are foreign features: “Anatomy of a Fall” and “”. A third, “Past Lives”, is an American production but mostly in Korean. Nearly half of this year’s nominees across all categories are not American, including directors of four of the ten films up for Best Picture.
Eager to deflect negative publicity, the Academy took steps to move beyond the demographics of the 90210 postcode. The Academy’s governors weeded out inactive voters and invited a greater diversity of film-makers to join. Membership has since grown from around 6,000 in 2014 to more than 10,800 today. The share of members from under-represented races and ethnicities has doubled, and nearly a fifth of them now live outside America.
After #OscarsSoWhite, the look and feel of a Best Picture film began to change. Last year Stephen Spielberg’s “The Fablemans”, a story about a young film-maker that is the kind of thing Hollywood has always favoured, was bested by, a film marketed as a breakthrough in the representation of Asians on screen. The message is clear: the Academy does not look like it used to—and does not think like it, either.”, Greta Gerwig, an American who was not nominated for Best Director.