The unprecedented Oscar haul for South Korean director Bong Joon-ho black comedy “Parasite” has shattered a 92-year-old glass ceiling and opened a new era for Korean and other foreign films on the global stage.

A genre-defying thriller about a poor family infiltrating a wealthy household, “Parasite” won four Oscars Sunday night, becoming the first non-English language film to win the top prize since the Academy Awards debuted in 1929.

The film, shot in Korean and without any international cast members, achieved a feat that could potentially be game-changing.

“Not only did director Bong change South Korea’s cultural history, he also changed the history of Hollywood,” the South’s major daily Chosun Ilbo wrote in its editorial Tuesday.

The Academy had been “obsessed with English-language films made by white people” it said, so that it was harder “for a Korean person to win an Oscar with a Korean-language film than be awarded a Nobel prize for literature”.

But the movie’s awards — it also took best director and best original screenplay, as well as best international feature — signaled the “arrival of a new era” and created “tremendous potential” for foreign pictures in the US, said Gina Kim, a professor at UCLA and filmmaker originally from the South.

Hollywood “still prevails and dominates the film industry worldwide”, she told AFP, and “has been notorious for not allowing foreign language film to enter its own ‘turf’. With the success of ‘Parasite’, it is changing”.

After his victory, the director told reporters that people around the world were increasingly connected.

“So I think naturally we will come to the day when a foreign-language film or not doesn’t really matter, and a foreign-language film winning this won’t be much of an issue later on hopefully,” he said.