Actor John Cho has been congratulated for the Parasite Oscar wins, despite not being in the movie.
The 47-year-old took to Twitter to reveal that he'd been mistaken for a member of the crew simply because he was standing with its cast, causing the social media website to erupt with a "sad commentary" about the prevalence of racial profiling.
This is the moment Parasite won the Academy Award for best picture:The South Korean movie Parasite made history at last night's Academy Awards where it won an incredible four Oscars. To put the scale of this win into context, this matched the record set by Walt Disney back in 1953, per Business Insider Malaysia.
Cho, who made a name for himself on Star Trek, and recently starred in the 2018 movie thriller Searching, tweeted: "Standing with Parasite crew, I got congratulated A LOT. Lol."
Now, for clarity's sake, Cho had absolutely no involvement in the making of Parasite.
In response to the tweet, one person said that it was a "sad commentary" on the prevalence of racial profiling in today's society, and that the people congratulating Cho probably saw someone who "looked Korean and figured [he was] part of Parasite's 'large cast'."
While one Twitter user said that being mistaken for a crew member wasn't the most offensive mistake, writing, "its [sic] ok to mistake someone as a crew member". They were quickly rebuked by another who wrote: "Dude, it's JOHN CHO. He's a household name. You're really going to tell me you wouldn't recognize the guy who played Sulu and Harold if you saw him?"
Another person simply concluded that they'd now be able to get in on the Oscars action: "I'm Asian and I expect coworkers congratulate me tomorrow."
While this is an unfortunate example of the prevalence of racial profiling (let's face it, no one would be giving Brad Pitt a high five for his work on Joker), the blunder thankfully did not detract from the movie's success with it scooping up the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film, and Bong Joon Ho winning Best Director and Best Screenplay.