As the year 2020 rolls along on
its first month, the entertainment sector delves deeper into awards season. A
big name in that regard, namely the Golden Globes, has already given its
accolades weeks ago and there are still more in the way. But this Sunday evening
it was the turn of the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television
and Radio Artists to present its nods to the best in the field of film and television.
And here, what was once an honor for a South Korean dark comedy-thriller film
when it was nominated for the next Academy Awards became an outright awards
triumph.
By that we mean that in the 26th
Screen Actors Guild Awards held January 19 at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium, Bong
Joon-ho’s 2019 South Korean movie “Parasite” won a major award, the one foreign
film in contention for that particular category. As The LA Times has it, For the Screen Actors Guild award of
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, “Parasite” would beat
out other similarly Oscar-nominated American-produced blockbusters such as Quentin
Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Martin Scorsese’s Netflix gangster
epic “The Irishman” and Taika Waititi’s WWII-set satire “Jojo Rabbit.”
When the award was called out,
the primary cast for “Parasite” – Park So Dam, Lee Sun Kyun, Choi Woo Shik, Lee
Jung Eun and Song Kang Ho – all went up on stage to receive their statuettes of
The Actor. It is well-earned considering the plot of Bong’s film is of an
impoverished but ambitious South Korean family which pretends to be unrelated
individuals so that all could be employed by an affluent household. Song Kang
Ho, who portrays the father of the poor family, notes in his acceptance speech
that receiving an award of such caliber is proof to their production that “Parasite”
cannot be a bad movie.
“Although the title is
‘Parasite,’ I think the story is about co-existence and how we can all live together,”
says Song.
While Bong Joon-ho’s film already
has made the South Korean film industry proud thanks to its multitude of
nominations for the upcoming 92nd Academy Awards next month, being
awarded by the Screen Actors Guild for an outstanding cast performance in “Parasite”
– only the second foreign film to be so honored – is bound to make the movie’s Academy
Awards dreams even more tangible than ever. That is doubly so for being
nominated for both Best International Feature Film and Best Picture.
In yet another proof of the
global viability of “Parasite,” HBO has contracted Bong Joon-ho to work with
Adam McKay in adapting the film into a limited series. There is no word however
if this will be a westernized remake or an actual movie follow-up.
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