To be accurate, it won four awards! Not the Oscars PR night Apple might have wanted, but a win is a win.
For the last month or so, we have been trawling directors and editors' websites and social media accounts looking for Oscar nominees that have been cut on Final Cut Pro X. We were hoping that FCPX would get a hat trick after winning the live action short film award twice in succession and getting a write-up of the workflow on FCP.co:
2019 Winner 'Skin' Anti-racist Short Movie Edited with Final Cut Pro X Gets Nominated for Best Live Action Short Film at the 2019 Academy Awards
2018 Winner 'The Silent Child' How to Produce an Oscar-Winning Movie with No Budget but Loads of Talent and Good Will: The Amazing Story Behind the Making of "The Silent Child", Cut with FCPX
But it wasn't to be. The Neighbors' Window by Marshall Curry won last night and we think it was cut on Avid.
Parasite's win wasn't a complete shock as various new outlets were hinting that the South Korean film might get the best picture. Bong Joon-ho's story of two different social class families living in Seoul was nominated in the Golden Globes, BAFTAS and won the Palme d'Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
Lucky readers in the US can watch Parasite on Amazon Prime. We would expect the film to become available in more territories and on more platforms very soon.
Will Apple be breaking out the Californian sparkling wine in Cupertino? Possibly. The fact that Final Cut Pro 7 was used to cut the film doesn't exactly fit their current marketing strategy, even though they were using ProRes proxies from RED to cut with. FCPX haters will surely use the fact that a piece of software that was killed off in 2011 has made a bigger impact on the Oscars than all the other years of FCPX put together.
No Ronny Courtens workflow dissection on this one, but we can point you in the direction of three further reads:
Parasite Editor Jinmo Yang on the Road From South Korea to the Oscars
How Parasite Uses Brilliant Design and Invisible VFX to Transcend Language
ART OF THE CUT with the editor of 2019 Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Parasite”
Of course, if you hear of any other film using FCPX at the 2020 Academy Awards, please let us know!
Images courtesy of NEON + CJ Entertainment