US President Donald Trump took aim at Parasite‘s historic Best Picture win at the Oscars: ‘What the hell was that all about?’
Bong Joon Ho’s genre-defining class warfare triumph was the biggest victor at this year’s Academy Awards, taking home four awards – all first-time wins for South Korea.
However, Trump wasn’t impressed. While appearing at a rally on Thursday, February 20, in Colorado, the president said to a booing crowd: ‘How bad were the Academy Awards this year?’ Thankfully, the film’s distributor has the perfect response.
You can check out Trump’s complaints about the film in the video below:
Bong took home the awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay, while the film swooped the Best International Feature Film and Best Picture prizes, the latter beating out the likes of 1917 and Joker – also marking the first time a foreign-language film has won the biggest award in movies.
Standing at the podium, Trump said:
How bad were the Academy Awards this year? ‘And the winner is… a movie from South Korea!’ What the hell was that all that about? We’ve got enough problems with South Korea, with trade. On top of that, they give them the best movie of the year.
Was it good? I don’t know. Let’s get Gone With the Wind back, please? Sunset Boulevard. So many great movies. I thought it was Best Foreign Film, no? Did this ever happen before?
After the clip of Trump’s sentiment went viral online, Parasite‘s US distributor snapped back with aplomb. Retweeting the video, the Neon account wrote: ‘Understandable, he can’t read,’ along with the hashtag #Bong2020.
Trump didn’t just focus on Parasite, however – he also took a jab at Brad Pitt after his pithy Oscar acceptance speech. ‘And then you have Brad Pitt, I was never a big fan of his. He got up, said a little wise guy thing. He’s a little wise guy,’ the president said.
While collecting his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Pitt discussed his childhood and career, while also commenting on the impeachment proceedings:
They told me I only have 45 seconds up here, which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week. I’m thinking maybe Quentin [Tarantino] does a movie about it. In the end, the adults do the right thing.
On both articles of impeachment – one regarding abuse of power, the other obstructing Congress – the Senate found Trump not guilty, thereby allowing him to ramp up campaign efforts for the upcoming election.
#Bong2020, indeed.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.