As forecast, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s comic sci-fi drama Everything Everywhere All at Once had an historic night at the 95th Academy Awards, winning seven statues, including Best Picture. It is the most awarded Best Picture winner since Slumdog Millionaire took home eight awards in 2008. The film also became just the third movie in history to win three acting awards, with Michelle Yeoh taking Best Actress and Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis winning their respective supporting categories. The Daniels, who also won for Original Screenplay, became just the third duo in history to win Best Director. The film also won Editing.
Brendan Fraser completed his comeback, winning Best Actor for The Whale and seeming genuinely overwhelmed by the moment. His speech, if we’re being quite honest, was a little rambling and incoherent at times, but it came from the heart, and there was no one watching who didn’t understand what he was feeling.
The loss for Austin Butler completed a shocking night for Elvis, which I and others had predicted would be a major winner. Instead, the Baz Luhrmann film was one of five Best Picture nominees to go home empty-handed, joining The Banshees of Inisherin, The Fabelmans, TAR, and Triangle of Sadness.
Another thing the Butler loss did was contribute to the end of the BAFTAs as an all-important bellwether. Long live the Screen Actors Guild. Every winner at the SAG Awards repeated at the Oscars this year, which meant not one winner at the BAFTAs pulled off the double. More shocking, perhaps, is that SAG and BAFTA did not align on a single award this year, but that’s a discussion for another time.
The one place BAFTA did end up having some predictive power was in the below-the-line categories, where Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front cleaned up. The powerful World War I adaptation won awards for Cinematography, Production Design, Original Score, and International Feature, making it the second-biggest winner of the night. Just an observation: The tradition is for the orchestra to play the score of the winning film to accompany the winners’ walk to the stage, and that now-famous three-note section of the All Quiet score sets quite the mood for an Academy Awards speech.
The Whale won for Makeup and Hairstyling, making it the only other multiple winner of the night, besides Everything Everywhere All at Once and All Quiet on the Western Front. The other below-the-line winners included Top Gun: Maverick for Sound, Avatar: The Way of Water for Visual Effects, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever for Costume Design.
Original Song deservedly went to “Naatu Naatu” from RRR, and as predicted, the performance of that song was the high point of the ceremony. Kudos to the Academy for staging it well and putting it right in the middle of the show. It was a perfect burst of fun and energy at the exact moment the broadcast, which ran about 3 hours and 40 minutes, needed it.
Netflix had another fine night, with The Elephant Whisperers winning in Documentary Short, giving the streamer its third victory in seven years in that category. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio triumphed in Best Animated Feature for Netflix, as well, becoming just the second non-Disney/Pixar winner in the last 11 years and the second stop-motion winner ever. Along with the four wins for All Quiet on the Western Front, Netflix walked away with a healthy six Oscars.
But, no studio could touch indie upstart A24, which distributed both Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Whale, giving it a haul of nine awards. The studio swept Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and all four acting awards. Since its inception, A24 has catered to the cool-kid crowd, and the victory for this weird little sci-fi movie will only enhance that reputation.
My favorite win of the night came in Adapted Screenplay for Sarah Polley’s superlative work on Women Talking. The victory was well deserved, and hopefully, Polley will get as much money and freedom as she wants to make the next thing. At the very least, the best movie of the year is an Oscar winner.
Another of the night’s great, if somber moments, came in Best Documentary, which went to Navalny, a portrait of the jailed Russian opposition leader. Director Daniel Roher brought Alexei Navalny’s family on stage and gave up the last portion of his speech to Navaly’s wife, Yulia, who preached a message of resilience and perseverance in the face of fascism and oppression.
All in all, the speeches were powerful and poignant. The back-to-back victories for Quan and Curtis to open the night got the tears flowing early. Though they were not my picks, it’s hard to begrudge either a moment in the sun. A sweet moment came when An Irish Goodbye won Best Live Action Short Film, and the filmmakers informed the crowd that it was co-star James Martin’s birthday. The whole crowd joined in singing “Happy Birthday.”
The show itself felt stripped down to mostly nuts and bolts, which was a refreshing change from the maximalism of last year. Jimmy Kimmel delivered a solid monologue at the top, nothing groundbreaking but charming enough to get laughs and prime the audience for an upbeat evening. The show was given over primarily to the awards and to speeches, which is how it should be. Only a couple folks were played off. One wishes that never had to happen, but less is better.
The only missteps came in promoting a trailer for the upcoming live-action Little Mermaid remake and in presenting a package dedicated to the 100-year anniversary of Warner Bros. that curiously included a number of MGM clips. Warner Bros. owns the MGM library now, but the company sure as hell had nothing to do with The Wizard of Oz or a number of other classics included in the package.
Regarding the trailer for The Little Mermaid, presented by stars Halle Bailey and Melissa McCarthy, yes, it was self-serving and tacky to show an ad for a Disney movie on an ABC broadcast. But, the folks getting up in arms about it seem to forget that the whole origin of this ceremony is to promote the great product Hollywood is selling. To suggest it undermines the integrity of the awards or any such thing is to misunderstand what everyone is gathered to do in the first place. You have the largest single audience of movie lovers you will ever get at one time – by all means, sell ‘em some movies.
While still off from pre-pandemic heights, this was the second straight year of growth in the ratings, which has to ease some minds at Disney/ABC. It’s half of where the numbers stood in 2015, but 18.7 million viewers is nothing to sneeze at for a live broadcast that isn’t the Super Bowl. One has to imagine it helped having two of the highest grossing movies of all time (Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water) in contention for Best Picture. If the viewership creeps back up into the 20 millions next year, there may be hope of saving this thing after all.
And, that’s it. A lot of folks in the industry and media are attempting to paint the victory of Everything Everywhere All at Once as some kind of sea change for the Academy and the industry at large. We’re a long way off from that, even if it were to happen, and I’m not buying it. Remember the last time these folks awarded Best Picture to a “weird” movie was as recently as 2017, when The Shape of Water triumphed. The next year, the top prize went to a Driving Miss Daisy retread.
Progress comes in fits and starts, and awards seasons come in cycles that loop back around on themselves. This year’s progressive pick can easily lead to next year’s bafflingly regressive choice. The good news is The Shape of Water is at least 10 times as transgressive as Everything Everywhere All at Once, so maybe the pendulum won’t swing back as hard next year.
On a personal level, one frustrating year can’t sour my love of this show and its place in movie history. I’ve been pretty spoiled lately by Moonlight, Spotlight, Parasite, the aforementioned Shape of Water, and a bunch of other great winners. So, they get it wrong sometimes. If that bothered me, I’d have stopped tuning in after the second show I remember watching with any intent, when The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King swept everything. If that couldn’t stop me, nothing will. Let’s do it again next year.
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