Slowly but surely, over the course of three and a half hours, the 95th Academy Awards ceremony went from runaway to nail-biting.
And then it became a runaway again, with pre-show favorite “Everything Everywhere All at Once” winning four of the last five categories, including Best Director, Best Actress and Best Picture. This came after the German-language drama “All Quiet on the Western Front” battled through the middle of the show, winning four awards and beating “Everything Everywhere” head-to-head in musical score to keep alive visions of a dramatic disorder.
But if “Everything Everywhere” didn’t exactly win everything, everywhere, it won big, and it won in all the right places. Just after the three-hour mark, it tied “All Quiet” with its fourth win in the Crucial Film Editing category, then moved on for good when the Best Director award went to directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
From there, the carefree and chaotic film hit home, securing its third award in all four acting categories for Michelle Yeoh. (Her co-stars of her Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis won two of the night’s first three awards, kicking off the film.) And then it scooped up the inevitable Best Picture award at the end of one of the sharpest Oscar ceremonies in years. it features Jimmy Kimmel as a suave and appropriately obnoxious host and also packs in some solid performances, quite a few rousing speeches, and the usual amount of dry stretches and quirky choices.
(An advertisement for Disney’s upcoming live-action movie, “The Little Mermaid,” as part of the show instead of a commercial break? An information segment at the Academy Museum that seemed similar to the segment at the Museum of the Academy in at least one previous Oscar? Obviously, this show serves some masters.)
But “Everything Everywhere” ended up being a popular winner, at least in the venue. And the delusion with which its victories were greeted makes perfect sense when you consider that the hyperkinetic, violent, rude and sentimental film is nothing like your typical Best Picture winner.
How did it happen? When it premiered at SXSW in March 2022 (before that year’s Oscars and exactly one year and one day before this year’s show), “Everything Everywhere” was met with largely positive reviews, but little was said about it. awards. But when “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Elvis” had their own debuts at Cannes, a festival much more accustomed to releasing award-winning films, the idea that films from the first half of 2022 were genuine Best Picture contenders began to take hold. , and when that happened, Daniels’ movie started getting mentioned in the conversation more often.
But the success seemed to take even the A24 dealer by surprise. Two weeks after SXSW and two days before the 2022 Oscars, the company gave the film a limited release in 10 theaters in North America, followed the following week by a one-night-only IMAX release. It had a wider release on April 8, followed at the end of the month by another IMAX release, this one for a full week. Then there was a re-release at the end of July, at which time awards viewers began paying a lot of attention to Yeoh, and by extension, the film itself.
But the thought that it might gain Best Picture still seemed crazy. After all, no one had seen any of the fall festival movies that often dominate the awards list. Still to come “Tár” by Todd Field, “The Banshees of Inisherin” by Martin McDonagh, “Women Talking” by Sarah Polley, “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” by Alejandro G. Inarritu, “White Noise” by Noah Baumbach, Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light”, Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”, Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale”, Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon”, Gina Prince’s “The Woman King” Bythewood, Maria Schrader’s “She Said”, Florian Zeller’s “The Son”, Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”, James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” and, perhaps above all, “The Fabelmans” by Steven Spielberg.
Given that lineup of 15 potential heavy hitters, plus the fact that “Top Gun” and “Elvis” seemed like more likely candidates than “Everything Everywhere,” the wacky little movie was still a long shot. But about half of those movies didn’t get much traction at the awards when they were released, and “Everything” never left the conversation. A24 was more frugal in its spending than many of its competitors, and it didn’t win critics’ awards like “Tár” did, but when the first major independent film awards show, the Gotham Awards, took place at the end of November, he beat “Tár” and gave Ke Huy Quan the first of many trips to a prize podium he would be making.
Meanwhile, nothing else really caught on. “The Fabelmans” had a stretch as the presumptive favorite, but Spielberg had been in that position with “Saving Private Ryan” and “Lincoln,” and he knew better than anyone how precarious he was. “The Fabelmans” and “The Banshees of Inisherin” won at the Golden Globes, but five days later “Everything Everywhere” won at the Critics Choice Awards and the narrative began to improve: it was the freshest and funniest, and it was going to win.
The first of Hollywood’s four major guild awards, the Directors Guild Awards, was fascinating and instructive. It seemed like every winner or presenter who took the stage at the Beverly Hilton, including the Daniels, paid tribute to Steven Spielberg and gushed about how much he meant to them. And then, after listening to people tell him how good he was for three hours, Spielberg lost to the kids. (Okay, they’re both 35, which means they’re not kids, but if you add their ages you get 70, which is six years younger than Spielberg, and that means they feel like kids when you put them next to him.)
“Everything Everywhere” didn’t win much the next day at the BAFTAs, suggesting it might stumble on the Academy as well. But then it won the Producers Guild Award and set a new SAG Awards record for consecutive days on a weekend, and it set a Spirit Awards record and won the Writers Guild Awards the following weekend.
And while it still seemed like a divisive movie trying to get the most votes in a consensus-seeking system, it felt like a closed case.
We’ll never know for sure because Pwc accountants don’t talk, but I wouldn’t be surprised if “Everything Everywhere” got more downvotes than nearly every other Best Picture winner in the last 12 years of rated usage. voting option in the category. But it could afford to get low votes and still win, because this is a new Academy with some of the same old blind spots but also a taste for quirky, transgressive movies.
And that meant that on Sunday night, in addition to playing a bit of rope-a-dope in the middle of the show and letting “All Quiet” win a few categories, “Everything Everywhere” blasted the competition so ruthlessly that five of the Best 10 Movie nominees, “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Elvis, “The Fabelmans,” “Elvis,” “Tár” and “Triangle of Sadness,” scored a 0 out of 33 combined.
The funny thing is, we pretty much saw it coming: Hardly any of Sunday’s awards were surprises, aside from “All Quiet” for production design. “Everything Everywhere” came in as the poster child for the new Academy and came out the same way.
If we weren’t paying attention when “Parasite” won three years ago, equally transgressive but a little less chaotic, now we are.
