Everyone everywhere in Hollywood loved it; the whopping landslide win for the absurdist multiverse action fantasy-comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once surely exceeded its creators’ wildest dreams. This alt-reality adventure, with its stroboscopic glimpses of other worlds and funky graphic-novel-style aesthetic, has captured the movies’ establishment citadel.
It scooped up seven Oscars: not just best picture, best director and best original screenplay for film-maker duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, but best actress for its star Michelle Yeoh (beating the frontrunner Cate Blanchett) as laundromat owner Evelyn confronted by her destiny as saviour of the cosmos, best supporting actor for Ke Huy Quan as her husband Waymond and best supporting actress for Jamie Lee Curtis as Deirdre Beaudeirdre, the grumpy tax inspector whose reluctance to accept Evelyn’s interest in more than one professional vocation triggers the parallel universe crisis. There was also best editing for Paul Rogers.
This triumph will be greeted with joy by its fanbase and with warily polite respect by those – including your correspondent – who are agnostic. But then the Oscar hivemind has always had a mysterious habit of coagulating around one particular film, ignoring the rest. My colleague Catherine Shoard has wittily described EEAAO as the first superhero film to win the best picture Oscar – yes, and there’s also a touch of YA fantasy and Harry Potter magic for the post-youth demographic. It has a wonderful cast: Jamie Lee Curtis has ruled the awards seasons coverage with her forthright, unpretentious and hilarious interviews (she might now break her rule about getting to bed early) and the very charming and lovable Ke Huy Quan has been a key part of the film’s smashing success.
The film has gripped people because all of us ponder what we could have been, in different lives, different universes, as the result of different life-choices. The movie speaks to the midlife experience: Evelyn’s multiverse madness is the equivalent of waking up in the Dantesque dark woods and questioning what has happened. Did I make the wrong move in my 20s and 30s? Is it too late for me? It speaks to the bad-marriage experience: am I with the wrong person? It speaks to the immigrant experience: how would my life be if I’d stayed in the old country? And, perhaps most intimately of all, it speaks to the parent experience: is my grown-up child, who is so like me, but with whom I have such a fraught relationship, just me but in a different universe? It is tempting to think the film speaks to conservative distrust of the big state, in the form of Jamie Lee Curtis’s meanie IRS officer. For me, the drama is paralysed by its consequence-free universe hopping. But it’s a big, bold, unusual film with a great diverse lineup.
At the risk of being ungracious, I must also record mild surprise at the win for Brendan Fraser for his role in The Whale, in prosthetic make up playing the saintly depressed English teacher suffering from extreme weight gain: my feelings here are with the naysayers for a stagey, pass-agg and laborious movie but Fraser’s gentle charm definitely won the hearts of Academy voters who love a comeback, and are affected by the actor’s story as someone who has surmounted a crisis in his own life.
As a longtime fan of Sarah Polley, I am pleased to see her Oscar win for best adapted screenplay for her sober, sombre drama Women Talking, based around the horrifying mass rape case in a Mennonite religious community: for those who feared that fickle Hollywood had become bored with the #MeToo issue, this serious and high-minded picture shows that it is still at the centre of the conversation.
Elsewhere, the box office behemoths got their share: best sound for Top Gun, best visual effects for Avatar: The Way of Water, and All Quiet on the Western Front (so recently the big winner at the Baftas) picked up best production design and best international feature.
So there it is: fans of Todd Field’s psychodrama Tár will now be feeling the way Cate Blanchett’s crazed conductor felt on seeing someone else up on the podium, and everyone involved with The Banshees of Inisherin, The Fabelmans and Living will have experienced every injustice everywhere all at once. The rest will raise a glass to the two Daniels for their amazing victory.
