The fact that a South Korean film has never been nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar is an absolute travesty.

So I watched Burning yesterday and it's been stuck in my mind. I've been watching/reading reviews pretty much non-stop since then and I'm now stunned that it wasn't nominated for an Oscar . It's easily up there with Cold War & Shoplifters as far as 2018 goes. Last year was pretty stacked in the category but I'd easily put it in over Never Look Away & Capernaum.

So I decided to look it up and was pretty surprised that not a single South Korean film has ever been nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. This blew my mind.

Some of the best modern directors are from South Korea. Chan-wook Park (Oldboy, The Handmaiden, Lady Vengeance), Joon-ho Bong (Okja, Snowpiercer, Memories of Murder, The Host), Chang-dong Lee (Burning, Secret Sunshine, Poetry), Jee-woon Kim (I Saw the Devil, A Bittersweet Life, The Good the Bad the Weird). How has not a single one of these films even been nominated for the Oscar?

Just by sheer market size you'd think it would get appropriately represented at the Oscars. South Korea is the sixth-biggest market for films worldwide, by box office revenue (behind the US, China, India, Japan, and the UK). It's also in the top-10 in movie production.

South Korea has submitted 30 films to the Oscars, and not one of them was nominated. Only Portugal, Romania, Egypt, and the Philippines have more submitted films without a nomination. 28 other different countries have been nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

What's up with the under representation of South Korea at the Oscars?

Submitted April 21, 2019 at 01:28PM by BunyipPouch http://bit.ly/2KRUXm0