Parasite in 2019. CODA in 2021 (largely French-acquired). Drive My Car nominated in 2021. The Academy's century-long Anglocentrism is breaking down.
For ninety-one ceremonies — 1929 through 2019 — no non-English-language film had won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The category had been, since its inception, structurally Anglocentric. Foreign-language films competed in their own segregated category, Best International Feature Film (renamed from Best Foreign Language Film in 2019), and almost never crossed over into the main race.
Then, on 9 February 2020, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite won Best Picture, beating 1917, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Joker. The previous most-decorated foreign-language nominee, Roma in 2019, had won Best Director but not Best Picture. Parasite broke a barrier that had stood for ninety-one years.
This essay examines why it happened then, and what it means for the next decade.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has historically been an organisation of about 6,000 voting members, mostly white, mostly American, mostly male, and on average significantly older than the audience for any given year's films. In 2015 and 2016, after two consecutive #OscarsSoWhite ceremonies in which no actors of colour were nominated in any acting category, the Academy publicly committed to doubling the number of female and racially diverse voting members by 2020.
The Academy met that goal. Between 2015 and 2020, the membership expanded by approximately 3,000 new voters — disproportionately women, disproportionately international, and on average significantly younger than the existing membership. By the 2020 ceremony, roughly a third of voting members were not American.
This is the simplest explanation for Parasite's win. The Academy that nominated Parasite was structurally not the Academy that had, every year for ninety years, voted for the English-language film.
The other structural change is that, by 2019, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu had made non-English-language cinema accessible to American audiences in a way no previous distribution model had. A Korean film could be on a US Netflix subscriber's home screen the same day it was on a Seoul Netflix subscriber's. Subtitling tools improved. The 'one-inch barrier' Bong identified at his Cannes speech had become genuinely lower.
The Academy voters who watched Parasite during awards season did not have to go to a single arthouse cinema. The film was distributed in 500+ theatres in the US — large for a foreign-language release — and was simultaneously available digitally. By the time voting closed, every Academy member had had access to it.
This is also true now of Drive My Car (2021, nominated for Best Picture), All Quiet on the Western Front (2022, nominated for nine including Best Picture), and The Zone of Interest (2023, nominated for five including Best Picture). The films are reaching voters because the streaming infrastructure delivers them.
For most of the 20th century, English-speaking American audiences treated subtitled films as a niche category — something for cinephiles, not for general viewers. The post-2010 shift has been generational. Audiences under thirty in 2025 have grown up watching subtitled anime, Korean dramas, Spanish-language Netflix series, and other formats that have normalised reading while watching.
Squid Game's 2021 Netflix launch — a Korean-language production that became the platform's most-watched series ever — is the cultural moment most-often cited for this shift. Subtitled content is no longer a barrier for the audience the Academy now contains.
It would be premature to read Parasite as the start of a continuous trend. The 2020 ceremony was a watershed moment, but the subsequent years have been more uneven. CODA (2021) won Best Picture as a mostly-English film with significant ASL content — a meaningful diversity win, but not, strictly speaking, a non-English-language win. Drive My Car was nominated in 2021 but did not win. All Quiet on the Western Front won Best International Feature in 2022 but lost Best Picture to Everything Everywhere All at Once. The Zone of Interest won Best International Feature in 2023 but lost Best Picture to Oppenheimer.
The pattern, then, is that non-English-language films are now plausibly competitive in the Best Picture race — they get nominated, they sometimes win technical categories — but only one has actually won the top prize since 2020. Whether this is the beginning of a slow normalisation or whether Parasite was a one-off remains an open question. The next decade will tell.
If the structural changes hold, the Academy of 2030 will be more international, younger, and more attuned to non-Hollywood cinema than the Academy of 2010. The combination of expanding international membership and the streaming-distribution infrastructure makes it likely that a non-English-language Best Picture winner will become a regular occurrence rather than an exceptional one.
This will, in turn, shape which films get financed. International filmmakers who can plausibly produce in their own language for global distribution will find their projects easier to fund. The shift will probably benefit non-American directors (Bong, Hamaguchi, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Almodóvar, Sciamma) and the territories that produce serious adult cinema at scale (South Korea, Japan, France, Germany, Spain, Iran, Mexico).
What it will not do, automatically, is change Hollywood. The studios in Los Angeles are still primarily English-language operations with American audience expectations. The Academy's voting body has changed faster than the industry it serves. The decade ahead is likely to be one in which the gap between what the Academy honours and what the studios produce widens significantly. That is also, in its own way, an argument against complacency. The change is real. The economic system that produced ninety-one years of English-language Best Picture winners has not, itself, fundamentally changed yet.