10 February 2020 - Oscars 2020: Taika Waititi is the first indigeneous director to win an oscar and foreign language film Parasite wins Best Picture award
'We can make it here': Taika Waititi urges on Indigenous talent after Oscar win
Charlotte Graham-McLay (The Guardian, 10/02/2020)
“I dedicate this to all the Indigenous kids all over the world who want to do art and dance and write stories,” said Taika Waititi, the New Zealand filmmaker of the Nazi-era satire Jojo Rabbit, as he accepted his Oscar at Monday’s ceremony. “We are the original storytellers and we can make it here as well.”
Waititi had just become the first Māori filmmaker to win an adapted screenplay Oscar, for Jojo Rabbit, which he adapted from the 2008 novel Caging Skies. Waititi also directed the film and starred in it as a bumbling, comedic Adolf Hitler.
Taika Waititi Makes History As First Indigenous Director To Win An Oscar
Josephine Harvey (Huffington Post, 09/02/2020)
Taika Waititi made history at the 92nd Academy Awards night when he became the first Māori person to win an Oscar.
Waititi won Best Adapted Screenplay for his World War II “anti-hate” satire “Jojo Rabbit” ― which he wrote, directed and starred in. He is the first Indigenous person to be nominated in the category and first Indigenous director to win an Oscar.
The New Zealand filmmaker accepted his award in classic Kiwi fashion, signing off his speech with the Māori greeting and expression of thanks “kia ora.”
He thanked his mom for “being my mother” and for introducing him to the book he adapted, Christine Leunens’s “Caging Skies,” before dedicating his win to Indigenous children around the world with aspirations to create art.
Parasite makes Oscars history as first foreign language winner of best picture
Catherine Shoard (The Guardian, 10/02/2020)
After an awards season marked by its predictability, the Oscars delivered a spectacular final-reel twist, naming capitalist satire Parasite best picture.
Bong Joon-ho’s comedy-drama about an impoverished family who infiltrate the household of a wealthier one is the first film not in the English language to take the top prize. It also took best director, best original screenplay and best international film.
Sam Mendes’s 1917 had been tipped to rule triumphant at this year’s Academy Awards, following its key victories at the Baftas, Golden Globes and crucial bellwethers such as the Producers Guild Awards. In the event, the harrowing first world war drama took three awards: for Roger Deakins’ cinematography and for its visual effects and sound mixing.
Bong’s film also defeated Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Jojo Rabbit and The Irishman to best picture.
Oscars 2020: “Parasite"'s best picture win can't redeem the academy's failings
Richard Brody (The New Yorker, 10/02/2020)
It’s worth starting at the end: the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s film “Parasite” won the Oscar for Best Picture—marking the first time since the Academy Awards were established, in 1929, that an international film has won the top prize. It’s about time. This happened a year later than I expected—I’d figured that Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” would win Best Picture last year—and it took me by surprise. I predicted that “1917” would win, and, inasmuch as “Parasite” is a far better movie, I’m glad to have been wrong. In a way, its victory attempts to right nearly a century of neglect. (Ingmar Bergman’s film “Cries and Whispers” was one of the five nominees in 1973, and lost to, of all things, “The Sting.”)