The 2020 Academy Awards ceremony had a potential to be a truly interesting night, even if there weren’t any legendary screw-ups like that whole “reading the wrong Best Picture winner” gaffe from a few years ago or “giving Best Picture to Green Book” like last year. Joker, a comic book movie about a clown, went into the show with 11 nominations, more than any other film this year, and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite was the first South Korean film to be nominated for both Best Picture and Best International Film. Both of them had to watch out for Sam Mendes’ 1917, though, which made an impressive showing this awards season (including a Directors Guild Awards win, which typically foreshadows a similarly successful night at the Oscars).
For the majority of the actual show, the most interesting thing about the winners was that there wasn’t a clear favorite among big, multi-nominated films like the aforementioned Joker or The Irishman. 1917 and Ford V. Ferrari both got a handful of awards before the major acting and directing categories came up, with the former getting Sound Mixing and Cinematography (a choice as seemingly obvious as Laura Dern’s Best Supporting Actress win) and the latter getting Best Editing and Best Sound Editing. Then 1917 won for Best Visual Effects, and it pulled ahead as the night’s frontrunner (though it did lose Best Makeup And Hairstyling to Bombshell, which definitely had the most makeup and hairstyling). Then Parasite won the first-ever Best International Feature Film award (formerly Best Foreign Language Film), continuing the trend of mild predictability—even if the win was completely deserved, which it was.
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And then we got to the big ones, the categories that would determine what would be the story of the 2020 Oscars. Would 1917 continue its faux single-take run through awards season? Would Joaquin Phoenix win the Clown Prince Of Crime his second Oscar? Would Parasite pull off the dream upset? Well, Phoenix did indeed win for playing Arthur Fleck in Joker, once again using his platform to make a full-hearted plea for the basic concept of fighting against injustice in all of its forms (it ended with a quote from his brother, so it got pretty heavy). Renée Zellweger won for Judy, continuing another awards season streak that has flown a little more under-the-radar against Phoenix’s more attention-grabby award wins. As for Parasite, nobody really saw that upset coming, right? It was 1917's category or maybe even Joker’s category, but in the end, Bong Joon Ho won Best Director and Parasite won Best Picture, the first time ever that a foreign-language film earned that honor. Hey, it ended up being an interesting night after all.
The full list of winners is below.
Best Supporting Actor
Tom Hanks, A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood
Anthony Hopkins, The Two Popes
Al Pacino, The Irishman
Joe Pesci, The Irishman
Brad Pitt, Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood
Best Animated Feature
How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
I Lost My Body
Klaus
Missing Link
Toy Story 4
Best Short Film (Animated)
Daughter
Hair Love
Kitbull
Memorable
Sister
Best Original Screenplay
Rian Johnson, Knives Out
Noah Baumbach, Marriage Story
Sam Mendes, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, 1917
Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood
Bong Joon Ho, Han Jin-won, Parasite