Parasite becomes first non-English film to win the Best Picture Oscar

On 9 February 2020, at the 92nd Academy Awards in Los Angeles, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite won the Oscar for Best Picture. It was the first time a film not in English, and the first from South Korea, had taken the Academy's top prize.

The darkly comic thriller about a poor family who infiltrate a wealthy household also won Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film, four awards in all. Bong shared the screenplay credit with Han Jin-won. The film had already won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2019, and it also took the top prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for its ensemble cast.

The result mattered far beyond the ceremony. It showed that a Korean-language film could succeed with mainstream American audiences and voters, and it drew new attention to South Korean cinema, which had built its reputation on directors such as Park Chan-wook, Lee Chang-dong and Bong himself. Many critics and industry figures later saw it as a turning point for how international films are distributed, marketed and recognised in Europe and the US.