Oscars 2020: A glorious, messy night of revolutionary wins, white guilt and feeble nods to girl power

The evening started predictably and ended with what many had thought impossible, writes Clarisse Loughrey. But it was filled with the same old frustrations

Bong Joon Ho reacts as he is presented with the award for Best Picture for ‘Parasite’ (AP)

What a strange, glorious, messy Oscars it has been. It started with the Academy self-flagellating over its structural racism and sexism and ended with Parasite becoming the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture. Somewhere in the middle, Eminem rapped “Lose Yourself”.

Has everything been magically fixed now that director Bong Joon Ho can fly home to South Korea with the country’s first Academy Award wins? Of course not. But after getting off to a predictable start, the seemingly impossible happened. Parasite, a subtitled film with a subversive, darkly humoured take on class struggle, beat frontrunner 1917.

A valiant effort to capture the horrors of World War I in two seemingly unbroken takes, Sam Mendes’ war epic wouldn’t have been an unworthy choice for Best Picture – but Parasite’s win feels symbolic. It’s a sign of the times: the world now seems to ping-pong between progress and regression so often that it’s hard to know when it’s safe to feel hopeful. Is Parasite’s victory as revolutionary as it seems, in a year with such an astonishing lack of diversity elsewhere? After all, every actor nominated this year was white, apart from Cynthia Erivo (in the Best Supporting Actress category).

Where do we focus our efforts? That sense of internal conflict resurfaced over and over again during the ceremony, though it never felt more prominent than in the acceptance speeches of Joker’s Joaquin Phoenix and Judy’s Renée Zellweger, for Best Actor and Best Actress respectively. The former gave an impassioned but labyrinthine speech, which tried to compact every global injustice into one train of thought. The latter began to list off heroes, making sure to name-check everyone from Martin Scorsese to war veterans.

Both were sincere, but it was obvious that they felt the burden of being handed such a major global platform. How do you change the world in the few minutes before the orchestra plays you off and your mic is cut?

It’s clear the organisers themselves didn’t believe Parasite would win – maybe they were still scarred by the upset of Green Book winning Best Picture over Roma last year. And so the show became an exhausting display of white guilt and feeble nods to girl power. Janelle Monáe kicked off the ceremony with a song in which she declared: “It’s time to come alive because the Oscars is so white!” What does that even mean? Alongside her, dancers were dressed up in tune with this year’s snubbed films: A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, Midsommar, Us, Queen & Slim. Who in the Academy actually watched Queen & Slim? Monáe was game and spoke openly about her identity as a black queer artist, but it was like trying to gently nudge awake a corpse. Why would the Academy listen now, with its failings put to music, when it’s never listened before?

The night was filled with many of the same old frustrations. Brie Larson, Sigourney Weaver and Gal Gadot came together to declare “all women are superheroes!” (counterpoint: some are very much not), while the Academy patted itself on the back for letting a woman conduct its orchestra for the first time in 92 years. Meanwhile, it saw fit to reward Greta Gerwig’s Little Women for its pretty dresses and nothing else, handing it Best Costume Design, while Gerwig herself wasn’t even deemed worthy of a nomination for Best Director.

But then, Taika Waititi became the first indigenous filmmaker to win an Academy Award, picking up Best Adapted Screenplay for Jojo Rabbit. He later took to the stage to acknowledge that the ceremony was happening on the ancestral lands of the Tongva, Tataviam and Chumash tribes.

While the Best Director category was all male, four out the five Best Documentary Feature nominees were directed or co-directed by women. American Factory won, with Julia Reichert using her platform as a rallying cry for worker’s rights.

We have as many things to celebrate here as we have to fight for. And Parasite’s win proves that the picture isn’t as dire as we’re inclined to paint it. The Academy, in Bong’s own words from his Golden Globes speech earlier this year, has finally “overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles”. Now it’s time to conquer the next barrier – and the barrier after that.