Parasite Makes History with Best Original Screenplay Win at 2020 Oscars
Bong Joon Ho and Han Jin Won are Oscar winners!
The duo took home the Best Original Screenplay award for Parasite at the 2020 Oscars on Sunday, beating out Rian Johnson (Knives Out), Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story), Quentin Tarantino (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) and Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917).
“Thank you!,” Bong said, while accepting the honor. “Writing a script is always such a lonely process. We never write to represent our countries. But this is a very first for South Korea.”
“I thank my wife for always being an inspiration to me,” he added. “I thank all the actors for bringing the film to life.”
Han went on to thank his family, as well as the “storytellers and filmmakers” in South Korea.
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Bong, 50, partially based Parasite on his experience tutoring a wealthy boy in the student’s family home in Seoul. The foreign-language film follows poor family the Kims as they slowly infiltrate the Park family’s home, getting jobs as tutors and housekeepers, all while pretending they don’t know each other.
“When you’re working as a tutor or a housekeeper, you’re in the most private spaces, and both sides are brought together in such intimacy,” Bong told The Hollywood Reporter.
Those interactions resulted in Parasite receiving acclaim for its commentary on capitalism and socioeconomic differences — but Boon didn’t originally intend for that to happen. “This idea of a poor family infiltrating the lives of a rich one is where I first delved in,” Bong continued to THR. “It was more like putting these characters together in a very controlled environment and then watching the chemical reactions unfold.”
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Parasite received a total of six Academy Award nominations, including a nod for Best Picture.
The 92nd Annual Academy Awards are airing live from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on Feb. 9 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC
