Name: Parasite
Director: Bong Joon Ho

Bill Kramer reached for the obvious memory, and he was right to. Asked in Tokyo why the Oscars keep looking outward, the CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences went back to the night a Korean film took best picture. “Of course, everybody remembers the moment when ‘Parasite’ won,” he said. “It was sort of a pivot, a shift, I think, in our thinking about what was possible with global cinema at the Oscars, and that continues.”

Most of the coverage has run that line as the emotional peg of a victory lap: a bigger, more international membership, a free worldwide broadcast on the way, and a leadership award from the host festival. The sharper reading came from the room. Twice during the audience Q&A, Kramer was asked a version of the same question: when does Tokyo get in? A pivot in thinking costs nothing. The Academy’s own case for it rests on three gates it controls, who votes, who qualifies and who watches, and the city hosting him is still standing outside one of them.

Kramer’s ‘Parasite’ pivot is real where the votes are

On membership, the numbers carry the speech. A decade ago, Kramer said, only 5% to 6% of Academy members lived outside the United States. “Now it’s 25%, and that number is growing.” The Academy has about 70 members in Japan, a figure he expects to climb, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “People are making movies around the world, people are watching films that are not in their native language more and more,” he said. “We’re making movies everywhere, we’re viewing movies in a much more nimble and accessible way, and the Academy needs to reflect that.”

Academy president Lynette Howell Taylor, who shared the stage with him, described the machinery: each branch has an Aperture committee charged with finding filmmakers abroad, with a specific focus each year on underrepresented countries. She also took the question that follows every expansion. “Just because the membership has increased does not mean that the qualifications have somehow decreased,” she said. “Our membership was smaller because we were not as global.”

The results are visible on the ballot. At the most recent ceremony, Kramer said, every category had international representation, best picture included. Meredith Shea, the Academy’s chief membership, impact and industry officer, said animated feature submissions grew from 12 to close to 40 over the more than ten years she ran that category, with at least six anime titles a year.

The festival gate Tokyo is still waiting at

The second gate is newer, and it is where the Tokyo audience pushed. Under rules introduced in May, starting with the 99th Academy Awards, a non-English-language film can reach the international feature race by winning a designated prize at one of six festivals, without its country’s official selection: the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the Golden Lion at Venice, the Golden Bear at Berlin, the Busan Award for best film, Sundance’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize and Toronto’s Platform Award. The Hollywood Reporter says Busan’s inclusion and Tokyo’s omission have been received as hard news by many involved with the Japanese festival.

Kramer’s answer was a plan, not a date. “We’re looking to expand the number of festivals that help films qualify for the International Feature Film category,” he said, per Variety. “That’s a process that we’re undertaking this year, so stay tuned for more information on that.” He told Deadline the first six were chosen “because we wanted to make sure there were juried awards, which not every festival has,” and in a later answer said the choice came down in large part to “the timing on the calendar.” The Academy, he said, is “just beginning these conversations.” Neither explanation names Tokyo. Neither rules it out.

YouTube is the biggest bet of the pivot

The third gate is the broadcast, and it carries the money. YouTube holds exclusive global rights to the Oscars from 2029 through 2033, after ABC’s final telecast in 2028; Deadline notes the Google-owned service outbid ABC, the show’s home since 1976. Kramer framed it as the same global logic: the ceremony free to 2.5 billion people in more than 30 languages. “So, for the first time, everyone around the world will have access to the show at the same time in the same format,” he said. “And that is a huge, intentional move by the Academy to reach a bigger global audience.” The Hollywood Reporter calls the deal somewhat controversial. Asked by Deadline whether the Academy had planned for the kind of friction other streaming deals with the film world have produced, Kramer drew a line: “There’s no censorship allowed at the Academy, at the Oscars, or on our broadcast.”

The message under all three gates is the one Shea said out loud: the Academy does not want anyone to feel it is “just an L.A.-based, Hollywood-centric organization.” Kramer also kept the old structure standing. Asked whether a more global Academy would make the international feature award redundant, he said: “Right now, I don’t see that category as being redundant.”

Kramer called this the Academy’s first official trip to the Tokyo festival, “but it won’t be our last,” and he leaves with its Global Cinema Leadership Special Award. The festival runs until November 4. When he comes back, the measure of the ‘Parasite’ pivot will be a simple one: whether a win in Tokyo opens the door that a win in Busan already does.

Tags: Oscars, Parasite, Tokyo International Film Festival, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Bill Kramer