‘Everything’ comes up roses: Everything Everywhere All at Once completes historic sweep

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.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Supporting Actor

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Supporting Actor

The nominees are:

Brendan Gleeson in The Banshees of Inisherin

Brian Tyree Henry in Causeway

Judd Hirsch in The Fabelmans

Barry Keoghan in The Banshees of Inisherin

Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once

The acting categories are truly exciting this year. It is rare that we have this much drama in four of the biggest awards of the night. I love it. Last year, I broke down the previous 15 years of winners across all four acting categories. Across 60 winners, there were at most eight that could even be considered surprising, and the real number is probably closer to three or four.

Last year was about as bland as they come with Jessica Chastain, Will Smith, Ariana DeBose, and Troy Kotsur sweeping their way to the Academy Awards stage with virtually no (pre-show) drama. I am not saying they were not deserving winners, particularly DeBose and Kotsur, but I am saying they were predictable. And, that’s not a healthy place to be for the future of this awards show.

This year, on the other hand, there’s drama all down the line. Actress is a toss-up between two worthy performers. Supporting Actress is a free-for-all. Actor is a fight to the finish between the up-and-comer and a comeback story for the ages. And, while Supporting Actor seems the most locked of any of them, there is one little stat that stands in the way of predicting a clean sweep for the frontrunner. Exciting stuff. Let’s get to it.

Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once – As much as I might prefer other performances in this category, it’s hard not to be happy for Quan. It’s the comeback of a lifetime. Even Brendan Fraser has been working steadily overseas and on television. Quan was all but out of the game. Before making Finding ‘Ohana in 2021, he had not acted in a feature film since 2002. It’s a cliché, but the put-upon husband/universe-hopping secret agent Waymond Wang is the role of a lifetime, and Quan did not miss his chance to leave a mark.

Though the script often leaves the actors high and dry, Quan makes the most out of what he’s given. Whether in the In the Mood for Love-style romantic drama pastiche or the Matrix-style fight sequences, Quan rises above the mess around him and pulls real emotion out of a character that’s pretty one-note on paper. Quan has already filmed the next Russo Brothers movie – a sci-fi action adventure movie, if you can believe it – and I’m sure he’s great in it. But, here’s hoping all this attention nets him some opportunities to dig into some real characters.

Barry Keoghan in The Banshees of Inisherin – Keoghan has been unforgettable in every movie he has appeared in. Whether in scene-stealing bit parts like The Green Knight or weightier supporting roles like Dunkirk, he brings an unmistakable blend of intensity and vulnerability to every role he plays. Though he had been around for a few years, I first noticed him in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer as an implacable villain hellbent on revenge. I called it the best supporting performance of 2017. He outdoes himself in The Banshees of Inisherin.

We have seen the village idiot character in plenty of movies before but never portrayed with this much pain and pathos. Keoghan plays Dominic as a man bound by circumstance, good-hearted in a cruel world, not wholly innocent but moral in his way. There is a gentleness to everything Keoghan does in the role, a touch so light you wonder if you felt it – that is until the tears start falling. It is a beautiful piece of acting, and I look forward to many more years of Keoghan’s work.

Brendan Gleeson in The Banshees of Inisherin – If we’re being honest, Gleeson is really more of a co-lead with Colin Farrell in this picture, but Farrell is the movie star, and Gleeson is the character actor, so it was always going to go this way. Regardless, Gleeson is perfect in The Banshees of Inisherin as a musician who just wants to use the time he has left composing songs and thinking about the weightier aspects of life.

Gleeson is an actor’s actor, great in everything he does, but he has been at his best working with Martin McDonagh and McDonagh’s brother, John Michael McDonagh. Between the two filmmakers, Gleeson has appeared in four features and an Oscar-winning short, and they comprise the best work of the performer’s long career. Maybe it’s because they’re countrymen, or because Gleeson just understands the rhythms of their writing, but whatever it is, it’s magic.

Brian Tyree Henry in Causeway – Because of the vagaries of moviemaking and the way release dates can shift around, sometimes an actor who has been working a while will seem to burst on the scene and be everywhere. I think a lot about 2011, when Jessica Chastain had Take Shelter, The Tree of Life, and The Help all come out within a few months of each other. Henry experienced that to the nth degree in 2018, when he had seven movies in which he appeared come out in theaters. His brilliance in Widows and If Beale Street Could Talk could not be denied, and it has all led up to this.

Causeway is a strange little film. It was sold to audiences as something of a comeback for Jennifer Lawrenece, but Henry steals every scene they’re in together. He doesn’t get a ton to do in the film – honestly, neither of them does – but he does what he can as a mechanic who befriends Lawrence’s wounded war veteran. It is an understated performance, but if the movie works at all for you, it is because Henry grounds the events in an emotional reality that brings you into the characters’ world.

Judd Hirsch in The Fabelmans – Hirsch has already made Oscars history with this nomination, breaking none other than Henry Fonda’s record for the longest gap between Academy Award nominations. Fonda went 41 years between his nods for The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and On Golden Pond (1981). Hirsch’s previous nomination came for Ordinary People in 1980, 42 years ago. Hirsch is also now the second-oldest acting nominee ever at 87 years old. He is three months younger than Christopher Plummer was when he was nominated for Supporting Actor in 2018 for All the Money in the World.

With this nomination, Hirsch adds his name to the list of one-scene wonders to strike it big with the Academy, joining the likes of Ned Beatty in Network and William Hurt in A History of Violence. Hirsch is only in The Fabelmans for a few minutes, but as Great Uncle Boris, he delivers the central theme of the movie to little Sammy Fabelman and makes plain the conflict that will haunt Sammy (and Steven Spielberg) for the rest of his life. Art or family? Family or art? It’s quick and to the point, and Hirsh holds nothing back.

The final analysis

I have talked a lot over the years about the BAFTAs as the best predictor for the acting categories at the Academy Awards. I have never felt less sure about that than this year, and that uncertainty holds across all four acting categories. So, bear with me as I feel this out.

Quan has won basically everything of importance, except the BAFTA. He has given humble, heartwarming speeches every time he has been given the opportunity. He is somebody for whom his fellow actors root. Everything Everywhere All at Once appears to be a merciless frontrunner for Best Picture, gobbling up every other award it is within striking distance of. I see no good reason why Quan won’t win this in a walk.

That said, Keoghan did win the BAFTA. Over the past 10 years, the BAFTAs have matched the Oscars in Supporting Actor eight out of 10 times. The two that didn’t: Barkhad Abdi won the BAFTA for Captain Phillips in 2013, while Oscar winner Jared Leto wasn’t even nominated by the Brits for Dallas Buyers Club; then, in 2016, Dev Patel won the BAFTA for Lion, while Mahershala Ali went on to win his first award for his work in the Best Picture-winning Moonlight.

In the past five years, they have matched every time. But, this year feels much more like 2016, doesn’t it? Patel is a beloved British star who did career-best work in Lion, much like the Irish Keoghan delivering his best work in a movie the Brits liked quite a bit more than they liked Everything Everywhere All at Once. Meanwhile, Ali was the heart and soul of the movie that went on to win the top prize, much like Quan is for this year’s Best Picture frontrunner. Never mind that Keoghan actually delivers the best performance of the group. The winner will be Quan.

Will win: Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Should win: Barry Keoghan in The Banshees of Inisherin

Should have been here: Nicolas Hoult in The Menu

A note about my favorite snub: As the amateur foodie who gets taken down a peg, Nicolas Hoult is pitch perfect in The Menu. He is exactly the right kind of infuriating, making you root for his downfall throughout the whole film. Then, when it comes, Hoult turns it around and actually makes you feel bad for the fate that will befall him.

Next time: Supporting Actress