The Baeksang Art Awards

by Nathaniel R

THE KING'S WARDEN won three prizes and is a huge hit in South Korea.

You might remember last year that we discussed that South Korea has a robust film awards calendar, with the first awards show of each year in May! I'm sharing it despite being well over a month llate because my number one film of 2025 No Other Choice took the big prize. The Baeksang Arts Awards do more than film -- they're an all around arts awards so they also honor theater and television. Eligibilty runs from April through March each year so it's a mix of late 2025 and early 2026 entertainments. As for the films some were eligible for last year's Oscar submission (No Other Choice prevailed obviously) and some are eligible to become South Korea's Oscar submission this year... though a lot of their competition has not yet opened.

The movie winners and nominations (and where you can watch them) --and a short epilogue on theater and tv -- are after the jump if you're interested...

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South Korean Film Awards & the Oscar Race

by Nathaniel R

THE UGLY... one of 19 films competing to become the Oscar submission

Since we've just starting hearing about Oscar submission decisions from the 100+ countries that Oscar invites to participate each year, let's talk about a country that wisely invested in their own arts, with both deregulation and regulation tactics (reducing government censorship whilst protecting home-grown cinema from Hollywood dominance via screen quotas) for the past couple of decades. The results have been impressive and South Korean entertainment is big in multiple countries now, including the US. While their cinema has been popular and lauded for some time, the American Oscars haven’t quite come around, with the sole exception of Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite (2019). It helped that Parasite had a) absolutely exquisite timing of festivals-to-theater-to-awards pipeline and b) was easy to spot as an instant classic / masterpiece. The former is hard (though not impossible) to manage and the latter is exceedingly rare! 

We suspect that Oscar’s resistance to South Korean cinema has to do with the Academy's general genre-aversion...

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