Bong Joon-Ho Making Oscars Kiss

Origin: the night Parasite swept¶

At the 92nd Academy Awards on February 9, 2020, held at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won four awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film. It was the first non-English-language film in the ceremony’s 92-year history to win Best Picture.

Accepting Best Director, Bong quoted Martin Scorsese — “the most personal is the most creative” — and turned to acknowledge him in the room, prompting a standing ovation for a rival nominee in the middle of someone else’s win. It was that kind of night. Afterwards, with more statuettes than hands, Bong was photographed backstage holding two of them nose to nose so that they appeared to be kissing.

The tweet¶

The photos did not go viral during the broadcast. On the morning of February 10, 2020, Twitter user @soalexgoes posted two of them with the caption “i love him.” The post reportedly gathered around 191,400 likes and 34,800 retweets within a day, and by that afternoon the image had spread to Instagram and Reddit.

How it is used¶

It became an object-labeling template almost immediately. Each statuette gets a label, and the kiss represents two things coming together perfectly:

• Two beloved characters, artists or franchises being shipped together.
• Two ideas that combine into something better than either alone.
• Two of the poster’s own interests colliding.

The format sits alongside Distracted Boyfriend and Left Exit 12 Off Ramp in the object-labeling family, but with an unusual tone. Most labeling templates encode conflict, temptation or a bad decision. This one encodes approval — the only widely used object-labeling image whose base emotion is delight rather than dysfunction.

Why it landed¶

The photo caught something the broadcast could not. Bong had spent the entire awards season being extremely funny in public through his interpreter, Sharon Choi, whose own performance became a story: at the Golden Globes on January 5, 2020 he told the audience that once they overcame “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” they would be introduced to many more amazing films. A dedicated fan contingent on Twitter had already named itself the “Bonghive.” The kissing statuettes gave that affection a single image — an acclaimed director, alone with his trophies, immediately doing something silly with them.

Legacy¶

The image is now standard shorthand for celebration and for perfect pairings, and it turns up every awards season as a reference point. It also functions as the visual record of a genuine turning point: Parasite’s win is routinely cited as the moment the Academy’s English-language ceiling broke, and the photograph attached to that moment is not the trophy shot or the podium speech but a director making two Oscars kiss backstage. That mismatch between historic weight and unguarded silliness is exactly why the picture has outlasted almost everything else from the ceremony — including the absolute-cinema standing ovation it triggered.