Tell me I’m dreaming. Tell me I’ll wake up soon. And if not, stab me with a #2 pencil. Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite has won the SAG Best Ensemble Award, or the guild’s equivalent of the Best Picture award. As Beetlejuice would say, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!”
Which means the heat has been slightly turned down on 1917, which last night won the top prize (Daryl F. Zanuck award) from the Producer’s Guild, and there’s a better-than-decent chance that Parasite, a finely crafted, widely respected but far from masterful social-inequity drama hampered by crude writing during the second half, might win the Best Picture Oscar. Maybe. Possibly. You tell me.
The Academy can’t give it the Best International Feature Oscar and the Best Picture Oscar…no! They can’t do this!
Parasite lead actor Song Kang-ho said tonight that “the [film’s] story is about coexistence and how we can all live together…to be honored with a best ensemble, it occurs to me maybe we haven’t created such a bad movie.”
I’m sorry but that’s total bullshit. Parasite is about the greatly suffering underclass and the absolute indifference to their situation on the part of the super wealthy. The story is about how a poor family (dad, mom, son, daughter) manages to con a rich family into giving them all cushy jobs, and it ends with the bloody slaughter of three people (two poor, one rich) during a backyard children’s party. Has Song Kang-ho lost his mind?
SAG has also saluted the same acting contenders that everyone else has gone for…Joaquin Phoenix, Renee Zellweger, Brad Pitt, Laura Dern.