The other night at a local library, I did an Oscars presentation, offering some uneducated guesses on who and what might win on March 12. When the subject turned to “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — a film that entranced roughly half the folks in attendance, while exasperating the other half, like some sort of love-it-or-hate-it rebuke to nuance — I said, well, here I am, right in the middle, careening wildly from admiration to exhaustion on this one, often within the same eyeblink moment.
For a likely minority, that’s the sort of movie it is. You can thrill to the breathless, clarifying skill of the editor (and now Oscar winner) Paul Rogers, even as you wonder if writer-directors (and now Oscar winners) Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert will go on to make all their movies together with the same nutty too-muchness.
At the library, we talked about how “Everything Everywhere” has become more divisive than the political divide in this country, even. That’s saying something. It’s Ron DeSantis’ woke-mob nightmare jammed into two hours of multiverse freestyling.
Yet, like last year’s Oscar winner “CODA,” and a few more Academy Award-winning films before it, at its core the film by the Daniels — about a Chinese American family living above their laundromat, confronting debt, internal fractures and alternate universes ruled by an everything bagel — is the latest heart-warmer to cakewalk all the way to best picture status. Is it a game-changer? Will we see more films like it? Do we want that?
Seven Oscars later, “Everything Everywhere” is in the books, and Michelle Yeoh is the first Asian woman to win best actress, among the evening’s firsts. All through the awards show Sunday, words such as “diversity,” “inclusion,” “representation” and other code red nouns signaled a veiled cultural threat to the part of America that never quite recovered from “Moonlight” and “Parasite” winning best picture. Let alone that “Creature from the Woke Lagoon” film “The Shape of Water.”
In one of the most stirring acceptance speeches Sunday, second-time Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter spoke directly to her “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” collaborators in the audience, saying with calm determination: “Together we are reshaping how culture is represented.”
The world, said Kwan at the end of the evening, “is changing rapidly. And I fear that our stories aren’t keeping that pace.”
This was an Oscar year dominated by two contrasting phenomena: “Everything Everywhere,” whirligig division, and “All Quiet on the Western Front” (four wins including best original score, ahem), historical epic division. My own favorite of the 10-film best picture nomination slate, “Tár,” a sly, steely portrait of one woman’s complicated comeuppance, never had a chance Sunday. Follow the money, as screenwriter, jaundiced Hollywood sage and Highland Park native William Goldman wrote, famously, in his script of “All the President’s Men.” “Everything Everywhere” made a lot of it. “Tár” lost some. “All Quiet on the Western Front,” well, probable moneymaker, but the specifics remain a riddle, wrapped inside an enigma, inside a Netflix phalanx of streaming algorithms.
We don’t really know where we are anymore. We barely know who owns what, and since when.
The Oscars have one foot in a Bob Hope past, full of machine-tooled, machine-learned jokes not worth the detour. The other foot, the one that votes, lands somewhere closer to the present, without any sure footing. That night in Highland Park, the crazy-stark divide between those who liked “Everything Everywhere,” both the what and the how of it, and those who wondered what happened to the days of yore — well, it was something. Heartening, though, in the end: Almost everyone had seen it.
Let’s close this Oscar season with five alternate universe categories …
Weirdest “In Memoriam” omission: Lots to choose from here! No Stella Stevens? No Paul Sorvino? No Chaim Topol? No Cindy Williams?
Lamest infomercials: Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” segment followed closely by the 100th-anniversary parade of Warner Bros. milestones, which included movies (“Singin’ in the Rain” et al.) that came from MGM, but now WB owns ‘em so the past is past, and who cares about the past, anyway.
Best musical segments: Some wonderful performances Sunday night, notably Lady Gaga’s piercing rendition of “Hold My Hand,” the song that gave “Top Gun: Maverick” a hint of real feeling. The highlight, though, was “Naatu Naatu” winning best song (yay!) and seeing those dancers from “RRR” tear it up. In host Jimmy Kimmel’s opening monologue, some of the same dancers delivered what turned out to be one of the only legitimate laughs of the evening.
Best preshow wardrobe comment: “I don’t ever like to be cold. And I don’t like my feet to hurt.” — Sarah Polley, sporting a tuxedo suit and sensible shoes. She went on to win best adapted screenplay for “Women Talking.”
Quickest hit-and-run topical reference from a newly minted Oscar winner: Daniel Scheinert, “Everything Everywhere” multiple Oscar winner, thanked his parents for “not squashing my creativity when I was making really disturbing horror films or really perverted comedy films, or dressing in drag as a kid. Which is a threat to nobody.” With anti-drag legislation on the rise, most recently in Tennessee, his comment added one more quarter-inch to the widening, warring sociopolitical divide in this country.
I suppose that’s hyperbolic. But I just watched another Oscars show, so hyperbole is chemically unavoidable.
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Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
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