At the 98th Academy Awards, the Best Original Song trophy went to Golden, from the animated film K‑Pop Demon Hunters. The track is written by a team consisting Teddy Park, Ejae and Mark Sonnenblick, became the first K-pop-rooted song to win Best Original Song at the Academy Awards.
Just as the songwriting team began their acceptance speech—thanking collaborators and acknowledging the unusual path that took a Korean pop-inspired track from animation studio to Oscar stage—the traditional play-off music swelled. The speech was cut short before most of the team had spoken. Within seconds the cameras moved on. In the press room backstage, the winners finished the speech they never got to give. Criticism poured in almost immediately. Fans called the moment dismissive and commentators pointed out that speeches for far less historically significant wins have stretched well past their allotted time.
K-pop is no longer a niche thing. Groups like BTS and BLACKPINK turned the genre into a global industry juggernaut. The success of the film Parasite at the Academy Awards in 2020 cracked open the door for Korean storytelling in Hollywood.
The incident exposed the Oscars’ peculiar relationship with globalisation. The ceremony has spent the last decade courting international audiences with expanding the Academy’s voting body, promoting diverse films, and celebrating cinema from outside the United States. But the institution still runs on traditions built for a very different cultural landscape. One of those traditions is the orchestra that politely but firmly tells winners their time is up.
None of this diminishes the achievement of Golden. K-pop, as an industry, has spent years fighting for recognition in Western cultural institutions that benefit from its popularity while rarely granting it equal prestige. The Oscar win changes that equation, even if the speech was shortened.
A K-pop song just won one of Hollywood’s most traditional awards. The speech barely made it to the second paragraph. The cultural shift, however, is already well past the closing music.
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