When Bong Joon-ho won Best Director at the 92nd Academy Awards ceremony in 2020 for Parasite, he thanked his fellow nominees—including shout-outs to his idol Martin Scorsese and pal Quentin Tarantino—and proposed a way to assuage his guilt over sending them home empty-handed. “If the Academy allows,” said the South Korean filmmaker, “I would like to get a Texas Chainsaw, split the Oscar trophy in five, and share it all with you.”
Taking a power tool to the Oscars is a great idea, and it’s fun to think about all the times when it could have been wielded with purpose (perhaps to chase James Franco off the stage in 2011). There’s a difference between false modesty and authentic humility, and Bong’s gesture of grindhouse diplomacy wasn’t entirely off base. 2020 offered a strong crop of nominees: not a patch, on, say, 1976, when Milos Forman beat out Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, and Sidney Lumet (the competition was so stiff that Steven Spielberg was snubbed for Jaws) but solid all the same, notwithstanding the absence of Greta Gerwig for Little Women. Seeing Bong, a master entertainer in the Spielberg tradition, being applauded by the likes of Marty and QT felt significant: if not a passing of the torch, then a vibe shift. Parasite’s massive critical and commercial success in the United States had happened because of the film’s cultural specificity, not in spite of it. Bong’s victory was not only historic, but also won on his own terms.
The Oscars love-in for Parasite made for great television and solid morning-after op-ed fodder, with writers scrambling to parse what the film’s victory meant—whether for Hollywood, or South Korean cinema, or the awards themselves. The general agreement was that the euphoria prompted in certain corners by Bong’s sweep of the major categories was actually the start of something exciting. In Slate, Dan Kois imagined “an era of artistically ambitious, diverse, of-the-moment movies finally going rewarded in a way we’d spent our whole lives assuming the Academy would never do. The triumph of Parasite makes it official: That new era has arrived.”
Five years later, that new era is over, depending on who you ask. Or maybe it never really started in the first place. Notwithstanding 2024’s selection of Oppenheimer—a flawed but worthy work by a major director that also happened to gross nearly a billion dollars, making its victory inevitable—the 2020s have so far yielded a pretty feeble crop of Best Picture winners: Nomadland, CODA, and Everything Everywhere All at Once—a movie made partially under the sign of Parasite, with considerably less discipline. 2025’s nominees include a few “artistically ambitious, diverse, of-the-moment movies,” but arguably only one great one: not The Brutalist, which surely strives for greatness, but Nickel Boys, a challenging and emotional reinvigoration of period-piece storytelling that was fumbled by its distributor, Amazon MGM Studios. (Nickel Boys has made less than $3 million in theaters; it’s yet to go into wide release.) If not for the backlash against its star, Karla Sofía Gascón, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez could have gone down in history as one of the worst winners ever—a nasty, fatuous doppelgänger to Parasite’s transnational success story. Edward Berger’s Conclave—which just copped a best ensemble acting award from the Screen Actors Guild—feels largely like a throwback to the middlebrow awards bait of the 1980s and ’90s, right down to the presence of an unsmiling Ralph Fiennes.
If Sean Baker’s lurid, virtuoso screwball comedy Anora actually wins Best Picture, it’d join Parasite on the very short list of films to score the Palme d’Or at Cannes before being honored in Los Angeles. Anora is a success, but between Baker’s recent plea on behalf of independent cinema—and Brady Corbet’s comments that he hasn’t exactly gotten rich off of The Brutalist—it’s clear that things aren’t exactly breaking in the direction of artists right now.
There are, of course, other reasons that the 2020 Academy Awards feel so far away. It was the last Oscars before COVID, and also the last before awards season—and the industry as a whole—was completely captured by streamers. Or, if you want to go even further than that: “2019 was the last fucking year of movies,” said Quentin Tarantino in conversation with Elvis Mitchell at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, effectively conflating the release of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood with the end of cinema as we know it. Nobody has ever accused QT of being humble. No doubt that when Tarantino eventually releases his 10th feature, the rhetoric around it will be something along the lines of “the movies are back.” But for all of his bluster, Tarantino knows ball. And while the 2020 Oscars weren’t necessarily a gold standard for quality—take your bow, Taika Waititi—the long view suggests that the results can be seen in retrospect as a set of hinge moments.
If Parasite was 2020’s big winner, the most conspicuous loser—as in a zero-for-10-performance—was The Irishman. Never mind that Scorsese’s fictionalized biopic of hitman Frank Sheeran is a brilliant and magisterial piece of work that transcends statuettes; the film’s failure to win a single award was seen as a sign of resentment toward Netflix, which had crashed the Oscar race a year earlier with Roma. The bigger story, though, was how the film’s PR campaign had doubled as a polemical minefield, with Scorsese speaking candidly about the challenges of 21st-century studio financing—and the necessity of working with a streaming giant in order to make the movie he wanted to make—as well as igniting the rage of superhero-movie fans with his dismal assessment of the artistic values of Marvel.
In 2020, Netflix’s chief was Scott Stuber, who struck deals with Scorsese and a number of other A-list directors, including Bong, to show that the company could compete in the prestige arena. In 2022, The Hollywood Reporter quoted an anonymous source as saying that Netflix would be moving away from “expensive vanity projects,” citing The Irishman as Exhibit A. Since then—and especially after the hire of Dan Lin in 2024—Netflix has taken on an air of austerity, focusing on more “audience-friendly” projects, moving away from auteur cinema and toward slop (although in acquiring Emilia Pérez at Cannes, Netflix arguably got a two-for-one deal).
Scorsese’s shadow also fell over 2020’s highest-grossing Best Picture nominee, Joker, which arrived just in time to challenge—if not contradict—the idea that comic book movies shouldn’t be taken too seriously. (For his part, Scorsese was even less interested in talking about Joker than The Avengers.) To give Todd Phillips’s movie its due, Joker wasn’t so much a theme-park ride as a hall of mirrors reflecting (or distorting) a wide spectrum of influences—not only Scorsese’s cinema of loneliness (as exemplified by Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy) but also New Hollywood classics like Network and Dog Day Afternoon.
The idea that Joker’s portrait of a murderous outsider plotting revenge against the showbiz establishment represented something dangerous and unpredictable was always overstated: genuinely subversive movies don’t usually gross a billion dollars. (A case can be made that Joker: Folie à Deux is actually the bolder movie, though that doesn’t mean it’s any good.) And while Joaquin Phoenix’s Best Actor Oscar was fine as a consolation prize for his superior work in The Master, Antonio Banderas was probably a better choice for his delicate and nuanced work in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory. Still, Joker has aged better than, say, Bombshell—a movie that nearly won Charlize Theron her second award for her sympathetic impersonation of Megyn Kelly, and might be due for a Kennedy Center screening any day now.
As for Bong, he’s about to release his newest feature, the sci-fi comedy Mickey 17. The arrival of a follow-up to Parasite should be a cause for celebration, and yet there have been ominous signs so far. The film was supposed to come out in 2024 before getting delayed; its opening date has been shuffled around several times by Warner Bros., the studio currently being overseen by noted cinephile and friend to artists everywhere David Zaslav. The premise of Robert Pattinson as a disposable worker drone who keeps dying violently only to be resurrected in different incarnations is promising—a filmmaker as singular as Bong satirizing concepts of conformity and expendability—and the director has stressed that he had final cut. The question is whether depositing Mickey 17 somewhat unceremoniously in early spring will be a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of its reception. In 2020, it felt like Bong had as much carte blanche as any director of his generation; if rumors are true and Mickey 17 cost in the neighborhood of $150 million, anything less than Parasite-sized returns could be seen as a failure. The promise of the 2020 Oscars was real, but also contingent. Whatever the outcome, it’s hard to imagine Sunday’s broadcast inspiring a similar sense of optimism. The most deserving honoree at the 92nd Academy Awards was somebody who wasn’t actually in attendance. Several months before the broadcast, David Lynch had accepted a special Governors Award. Lynch didn’t need the Academy’s validation, of course. If anything, seeing him with an Oscar had the reverse effect: It made the institution seem more important by association. In his speech, which ran just under a minute, the director offered what sounded like heartfelt thanks. Despite being pretty handy when it comes to woodworking and metals, Lynch didn’t think to take a chainsaw to his statuette. Instead, he concluded by saying that it had a nice face.
