I might have predicted it, but I still can’t quite believe it. Parasite, the South Korean satirical thriller, has become the first film in a language other than English to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. A 92-year Oscar streak has been broken, an unspoken rule in Hollywood upended. A town renowned for self-obsession has done the unthinkable, and looked outwards.

With its name now etched on four statuettes – Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and, naturally, Best International Feature are the other three – Parasite has joined Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as one of the most-rewarded foreign-language films in Oscar history. And yet, even those two films weren’t quite well-loved enough by the Academy to win the evening outright. But Parasite was, and did – and how. Its director, Bong Joon-ho, is now one of only two individuals to have won four Oscars in a single night: the other, in 1953, was Walt Disney.

What’s more, he did so in the face of some exceedingly macho vintage Oscar bait. The widely touted frontrunner was Sam Mendes’s 1917, a First World War film whose formulaic virtuosity might as well have been specifically designed to win awards. (Which it had done, repeatedly, at the Baftas the previous weekend.)