It has been six years since the Academy Awards ended with an old-guard error that culminated in a shock of the new. After a now-infamous envelope mixup involving Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, the megahit studio musical La La Land ultimately lost the best picture Oscar to Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ low-budget character study of a Black gay man’s coming of age. Moonlight was released by the hip, still-green indie studio A24, then only four years into its existence. It was the very first film A24 had produced from the outset, after establishing itself by acquiring and distributing finished products: it could hardly believe its beginner’s luck.
Fast-forward to this year’s Oscar race, and A24 is no longer David but Goliath, with the heavily tipped best picture frontrunner Everything Everywhere All at Once. Directed by wacky duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, it’s a genre-bending fusion of comedy, action, sci-fi and immigrant family drama that surprised everyone last spring by racking up more than $100m worldwide. That made it the biggest hit in A24’s 10-year history, the crown jewel of a portfolio that includes Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017), Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade (2018), Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (2020) and Ari Aster’s cultish art-horror films Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019).
