History made as ‘Parasite’ wins best picture at ‘Oscars’

By Scott McCabe

Parasite was part of film history this week as it became the first foreign film to ever win the award. ‘The Guardian’ wrote a compelling article surrounding the story.

The article was written by ‘Catherine Shoard’. Shoard did a fantastic job of describing the triumphs of the film and why this was such a poignant moment in film history. She covered major taking points such as the mega films that ‘Parasite’ managed to beat to the award of Best picture with Once upon a time in Hollywood and 1917 being amongst the list.

The article didn’t only focus on the film, but also the director Bong Joo Ho. Shoard included quotes of praise that Bong gave to the likes of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, these quotes provided the article with the emotion and description needed to convey Bong’s gratitude and admiration for his achievement.

Shoard then brought her knowledge of film to the article as she went into detail about the previous foreign films that had been nominated for best picture, and even gave us examples[Amour]. The lack of personal response was vital as it gave the reader a level playing field to grasps their own thoughts on the movie and Shoard did an excellent job of letting the reader make up their own conclusion.

As the article carried on, I felt as if it lost its way and context. At the beginning of the article it is all information based on Parasite accompanied by the headline ‘parasite makes Oscars history as the first language winner of best picture’. However, the article nearly turns into a summary of the Oscars instead of focusing on the achievements of Parasite, the writer dwindles off and talks about Joaquim Felix’s speech and then begins to write about the the racial issue with the Oscars. Personally, I feel as if these two topics alone could have their own articles and the fact they were crammed into one large article with Parasite really dragged down the potential of the article.