Oscars 2020: A glorious, messy night of revolutionary wins, white guilt and feeble nods to girl power

The evening started predictably and ended with what many had thought impossible, writes Clarisse Loughrey. But it was filled with the same old frustrations

Bong Joon Ho reacts as he is presented with the award for Best Picture for ‘Parasite’ (AP)

What a strange, glorious, messy Oscars it has been. It started with the Academy self-flagellating over its structural racism and sexism and ended with Parasite becoming the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture. Somewhere in the middle, Eminem rapped “Lose Yourself”.

Has everything been magically fixed now that director Bong Joon Ho can fly home to South Korea with the country’s first Academy Award wins? Of course not. But after getting off to a predictable start, the seemingly impossible happened. Parasite, a subtitled film with a subversive, darkly humoured take on class struggle, beat frontrunner 1917.

A valiant effort to capture the horrors of World War I in two seemingly unbroken takes, Sam Mendes’ war epic wouldn’t have been an unworthy choice for Best Picture – but Parasite’s win feels symbolic. It’s a sign of the times: the world now seems to ping-pong between progress and regression so often that it’s hard to know when it’s safe to feel hopeful. Is Parasite’s victory as revolutionary as it seems, in a year with such an astonishing lack of diversity elsewhere? After all, every actor nominated this year was white, apart from Cynthia Erivo (in the Best Supporting Actress category).