Park Chan-wook got shut out of Oscars again. What went wrong?
In 34 years of directing, Park Chan-wook has never received an Oscar nomination.
The Academy overlooked "Oldboy," the revenge thriller that rewired action cinema. It passed on "The Handmaiden," his labyrinthine erotic thriller. When "Decision to Leave" won best director at Cannes in 2022, many thought that would be the year. It wasn't.
And now "No Other Choice," his darkly comic takedown of late-stage capitalism, came up empty as well.
When nominations for the 98th Academy Awards were announced Thursday, Park's film was nowhere to be found. Despite making the Academy's 15-film shortlist for best international feature, "No Other Choice" failed to crack the final five nominees.
Granted, a best picture nod was always a long shot, and Lee Byung-hun's chances in best actor were slimmer still. But few expected a total shutout. The international feature slot, at least, had seemed well within reach.
Ever since "Parasite" swept four Academy Awards in 2020 — including best picture, becoming the first non-English-language film to claim that honor — Korean film fans felt a door had swung wide open. If anyone was to follow in Bong Joon-ho's footsteps, most assumed it would be Park, the world-renowned auteur whose work helped put Korean cinema on the global map.
Six years later, that moment has yet to arrive.
The snub comes as a surprise because "No Other Choice" had, by most measures, done everything right. The film premiered at Venice to a nine-minute standing ovation, then claimed the inaugural International People's Choice Award at Toronto. At the Golden Globes earlier this month, it landed three nominations, including best musical or comedy and best actor for Lee.
The film has also performed well at the US box office since opening on Christmas Day. After expanding nationwide to 695 theaters on Jan. 16, "No Other Choice" has grossed over $7 million domestically as of this week — making it the second highest-grossing Korean film ever released in the US, behind only "Parasite."
And this year's nominations were among the most inclusive in Oscar history as far as geography goes. For the first time, at least one non-English-language film appeared in every single category, while a record four acting nominations went to performances in languages other than English.
Norway's "Sentimental Value" racked up nine nominations, including best picture and best director for Joachim Trier. Brazil's "The Secret Agent" earned four, with Wagner Moura becoming the first Brazilian actor ever nominated for best actor.
The snub didn't go unnoticed online. "That to me is just wild," one commenter on Reddit wrote. "It is easily one of the best films of the year." Another said: "In a fair world it would win best picture… in this insane timeline it is completely snubbed." Some argued the film wasn't quite as strong as Park's earlier work, but even skeptics didn't see a total wipeout coming.
So what happened? The Academy has never been easy to predict, but a few factors may have worked against Park.
The simplest explanation is that this year's international feature slate was simply too packed with bangers. "The Secret Agent," a political thriller set during Brazil's military dictatorship, had been building momentum since winning best director and best actor at Cannes. "Sentimental Value," Joachim Trier's family drama, swept the European Film Awards with five wins, including best film and best director.
"It Was Just an Accident," the Palme d'Or winner from exiled Iranian director Jafar Panahi — who has been sentenced to prison in absentia and barred from filmmaking by the Iranian government— carried both prestige and relevance amid ongoing anti-government protests in Iran. Spain's "Sirat," a genre-defying journey through the Moroccan desert, mounted a late surge after its own wins at the European Film Awards.
Then there's the Academy's curveball pick: "The Voice of Hind Rajab," a docudrama about a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. Most critics had predicted Park's film would round out the final five alongside the other four front-runners. Few saw this one coming.
A late-season campaign bolstered by executive producers including Spike Lee, Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix appears to have pushed the film over the line.
Just last year, the Academy awarded best documentary to "No Other Land," another film centered on Israeli violence against Palestinians.
Another potential reason is that Neon, the North American distributor behind "No Other Choice," had too many horses in the race. The indie powerhouse — best known for shepherding "Parasite" to its historic best picture win — holds US rights to four of this year's five international feature nominees: "The Secret Agent," "Sentimental Value," "It Was Just an Accident" and "Sirat."
Having a single distributor nearly sweep an entire category like this is unprecedented, and it's hard to imagine the Academy looked favorably on it.
There's also the question of how campaign resources get divided when one company is pushing five different films at once. Oscar campaigns don't come cheap — screenings, advertising, travel for talent — and spreading that budget across multiple contenders inevitably means priorities have to be set.
Even those with films in Neon's lineup had expressed skepticism about whether it could work. "I remember when they acquired all these films, I was like, 'How is this going to work?'" "The Secret Agent" star Wagner Moura told Gold Derby last week.
It probably didn't help matters that Park was expelled from the Writers Guild of America last year over his work on the HBO miniseries "The Sympathizer." The WGA alleged Park violated strike rules during the 2023 walkout; Park argued that the scripts were completed before the strike began and that his post-production work fell within the guild's guidelines.
How much that factored into voters' decisions is hard to say. But given the overlap between the Oscar voting body and WGA members, it likely didn't do Park any favors.
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