Who is popular today?

The Academy has finally caught up with the outside world in its appreciation of non-English-language film
After years of upholding the values of mainstream-prestige dullness and having cultivated a habit of rewarding mediocrity and conformity, the Oscars have made a bold and brilliant choice. Hooray for the good taste of Hollywood. Best picture, best director and best international feature have gone to a movie that really deserves it, a film from beyond the Los Angeles parish pump. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite from South Korea is the stunningly clever and powerful upstairs-downstairs satire of a predatory family moving into a wealthy household, and in so doing revealing the dual dysfunction of both the master and servant family groups and the unhappiness of wider society, disclosing a new 21st-century serfdom.
I admit that on a purely subjective level, I had been rooting for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, which sadly went home with nothing. I also thought it was odd that the awards establishment was behaving as if Parasite was the only foreign-language movie worthy of praise, overlooking films like Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son and Kantemir Balagovs Beanpole. Continue reading...