Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is probably going to win some awards this weekend. And if it does, it will enter rarefied territory that virtually guarantees it will win the Best Picture Oscar on March 12.
On the other hand, that guarantee assumes that precedent still means something in today’s Academy, which has transformed so dramatically that precedent seems to mean less and less every year.
In any case, the crowded penultimate weekend of this awards season kicks off Saturday with the Film Independent Spirit Awards, USC Libraries Scripter Awards, and Cinema Audio Society’s CAS Awards. Of those, the biggest is the Spirit Awards, which went 24 years without matching the Oscars with its winning best picture, but since 2011 it has matched seven times in 12 years.
These days, Spirit Award voters vote almost unerringly for the nominee who has the best chance at the Oscars, and “Everything Everywhere” is exactly the kind of movie they like to award, so there’s a good chance the movie dominate the Saturday afternoon ceremony. , despite the fact that it is up against other Oscar nominees “Tár” and “Talking Women”.
Then on Sunday, the Writers Guild of America, the American Society of Cinematographers and the American Cinema Editors will hand out awards, with the first of these giving “Everything Everywhere” the chance to complete a rare grand slam. He is favorite to win the WGA Original Screenplay category over “The Menu,” “Nope” and Oscar nominees “The Fabelmans” and “Tár,” and if he does, it will become the fifth film to win the top prize. of all. four of the main Hollywood guilds.
“Everything Everywhere” has already won Screen Actors Guild Awards, Directors Guild Awards and Producers Guild Awards, so a Writers Guild win will put it alongside “American Beauty,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Argo” as the only films to sweep those four awards. The first four won the Oscar for Best Picture.
If it loses in the sometimes unpredictable WGA, it will be one of nine movies to win three out of four; in that group, six films went on to win Oscars, while “Apollo 13,” “Brokeback Mountain” and “Little Miss Sunshine” fell just short of the Academy Award.
“Everything Everywhere” has already beaten nearly all of its main rivals — “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” “The Fabelmans” — at awards shows whose voters overlap with the Academy. And, what is more important, it is done through the system of voting in order of preference, which looks for a favorite by consensus.
That system was thought to be a potential Achilles heel for the more divisive “Everything Everywhere” until it won at the Producers Guild, the only show other than the Oscars to use it. The ranked election still has the potential to hurt “Everything Everywhere” with Academy voters, who are less closely matched with Hollywood guilds after a seven-year AMPAS membership campaign has found the organization to be becomes more diverse, much more international and less tied to precedent. . (There were strong statistics that suggested that the last five Best Picture winners — “The Shape of Water,” “Green Book,” “Parasite,” “Nomadland” and “CODA” — shouldn’t have won.)
The real wrinkle here is contained in the sentence from two paragraphs ago that “Everything Everywhere” has beaten almost all of its main rivals. That almost It’s key, because a film with enormous support across all Academy branches, the German-language film “All Quiet on the Western Front,” was not nominated for any SAG, DGA, PGA, or WGA awards. (He didn’t qualify for the last one, in which some of the top contenders are almost always ineligible.)
It seems counterintuitive that a movie that isn’t even nominated for those major awards can beat a movie that won them. And yes, it would break all precedents: In the years that those four major guilds have been handing out awards, no movie has won Best Picture without winning at least one of them.
But like “CODA” last year, “All Quiet” was a late-breaking movie that many voters didn’t get to until after some of the guild’s early voting had already taken place. It dominated the BAFTA EE British Academy Film Awards, where “Everything Everywhere” won an editing award and nothing more. And for voters upset by the hyperkinetic “Everything Everywhere,” he may have quietly become a major rival.
Will that be enough to seriously threaten the favourite? That’s unlikely, particularly as “Everything Everywhere” prepares to spend the final weekend before the Oscars picking up hardware.
The bottom line: I agree with virtually all of my fellow Oscar experts, and with all available precedent, that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” will win Best Picture and “All Quiet on the Western Front” will win. the award for Best International Film. and a couple of other categories.
And I also believe that these days, with this Academy, none of us know as much as we think we know.
