Anyone who’s seen a few Academy Awards ceremonies, however grudgingly, was probably doing pretty well in the betting pool on Sunday night, picking obvious winners. That is, until writer-director Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite started scoring Oscar after Oscar. We all expected it to win Best International Film (a newly named category previously known as Best Foreign Film, signaling a potentially less xenophobic Academy membership). But then Parasite took Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and most incredibly, Best Picture.

No “foreign film” has ever won Best Picture. Even the most jaded lefty was reeling for joy that, of all films, Parasite would be the one to set such a precedent. Because for many of us, Parasite is our film. Granted, it’s Bong Joon-ho’s and his team’s film first, and the Korean people’s second — but it belongs to the international socialist community third, embraced on behalf of the working class the film depicts with such acute understanding. We’ve been Bong Joon-ho fans from the beginning, we rave-reviewed Parasite to everyone who would listen, we talked it up to our families and friends and online communities, we hugged it to our hearts. After all, Bong is the director who said about the international reaction to his movie:

I tried to express a sentiment specific to Korean culture, [but] all the responses from different audiences were pretty much the same. Essentially, we all live in the same country, called Capitalism.