LOS ANGELES (AP) — As Daniel Kwan accepted one of the many awards for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” at the Academy Awards on Sunday night, he took a moment to reassure his young son that what happened was certainly strange.
“It’s not normal,” said Kwan, who directed with creative partner Daniel Scheinert. “That’s kinda crazy.”
“Not normal” and “kinda crazy” are increasingly reasonable terms for Oscar nominees for best picture. Three years ago, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, a masterful Korean genre film and class satire, became the first non-English language film to win Hollywood’s top prize. Last year, “CODA,” a humble and heartwarming indie drama that released in August, scored best picture and made history for the deaf community.
If these films started with little expectation of Oscar glory, the googly-eyed path for Take It All, Everywhere at Once was even less likely. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but historically, movies featuring butt plug fights and hot dog fingers don’t win Oscars. You certainly don’t win seven of them.
As a story about family and immigrant life, Everything, Everywhere at Once may be just as sentimental and old-fashioned as many Oscar winners before it. But it could be — and proud of it — the strangest Best Picture winner in the Academy Awards’ 95-year history. It’s at least a long way from “Patton”.
There’s been a lot to think about about what has and hasn’t changed in films since Best Picture winner 1971 during a ceremony that opened with Navy fighter jets flying overhead and saw Best Supporting Actor winner Ke Huy Quan, his Family fled Vietnam as war refugees. emotionally speaking about the surrealism of the American Dream.
Without a doubt, Everything Everywhere All at Once, for which Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win Best Actress, is an Asian-American milestone. But for many reasons, it’s a decidedly non-Oscar-like film that, like CODA and Parasite, never – in any multiverse – expected any of it.
“Sometimes it feels like we’re in our movie,” Scheinert said in a pre-Oscar interview. “Eventually we’re going to be pulled out of this joke and go back to our own lives and be like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t that be cool? A pity.'”
Still, it was striking how resoundingly the blissfully insane “Everything Everywhere All at Once” beat the competition. With acting wins for Yeoh, Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis, it is only the third film to win three acting Oscars, alongside A Streetcar Named Desire and Network. No film has ever won more Oscars above the line.
At the same time, much of the old guard was either absent or went home empty-handed. Tom Cruise, whose Top Gun: Maverick was nominated for Best Picture, was absent. So did James Cameron, whose “Avatar: The Way of Water” was not considered a real challenger. 25 years ago, Cameron was the “King of the World” at the Oscars with “Titanic”.
“Maverick” won for sound only, “Avatar” for effects. The paltry results for two films, which together have grossed nearly $4 billion at the box office, may have put some viewers off the show. Signaling early in the ceremony that Blockbuster was not on the menu, Academy voters chose Curtis as a supporting actress over Angela Bassett (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”), who would have been the first Marvel actress to win an Oscar .
Steven Spielberg and The Fabelmans were also completely excluded. Despite being nominated for seven awards, his most autobiographical film and the one he fought hardest to make didn’t win. Best Director went to the Daniels, who at 35 are the second youngest-ever winners.
More than ever, the Oscars belong to the underdogs. And the biggest loser might be Oscar bait.
Certainly many of the winners were conventional academy picks. Best Actor winner Brendan Fraser met many of the standard criteria with his prosthetic comeback performance in The Whale. And it would be unfair to call Spielberg’s thoughtful memorabilia – which somehow lost the “mother” narrative to the Daniels film – as award-winning.
But Sunday’s Oscars hinted that Hollywood is — for now at least — looking for Oscar movies that don’t look too much like Oscar movies. Part of this could be attributed to the changing composition of the Academy, which has diversified and now numbers more than 10,000. That includes far more international voters, a subtle turnaround that likely helped propel German-language WWI saga “All Quiet on the Western Front” to four Oscars and Indian sensation “RRR’s” Naatu Naatu for best song.
But even the reigning winners, while Hollywood veterans, were all newcomers. The victories for Yeoh, Quan and Fraser may all have been, in part, righting past industry wrongs. Fraser was largely forgotten and the victim of alleged abuse at the hands of a prominent member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Yeoh, a big star in Hong Kong, was pigeonholed in Hollywood. An indelible face of the 1980s, Quan had quit acting after years of struggling to find work.
Hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, the Oscars show was quite traditional as the academy tried to quash the drama of last year’s show. So it would be easy to miss that the floor is moving under the Oscars — and not just the formerly red-colored carpet.
But it’s more than a quirky slip-up when a couple of quirky, sensitive dudes with a absurd sense of humor win Best Picture for their only feature film, alongside The Farting Corpse. Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Daniels’ second film after 2016’s Swiss Army Man, may have struck a chord for channeling our dizzying digital overload into multiple dimensions.
“The world is changing fast and I’m afraid our stories aren’t keeping up,” Kwan said onstage at the Dolby Theater, citing the speed of the internet versus the slowness of cinema.
The Oscars tend to oscillate between trends. 2018’s much-discussed winner, Green Book, followed the landmark win for Moonlight the year before. The Barry Jenkins film was A24’s first Best Picture winner and now Everything Everywhere All at Once – A24’s biggest box-office hit, grossing $107.4 million – is the second for the specialty label. A24 won all of the top awards on Sunday, a first for a studio in Oscar history.
Backstage at the Oscars, Kwan told reporters that her “shotgun fire of joy, absurdity and creativity” ultimately stems from his own navigation through dark times and depression.
“And I really hope that the next generation can see a movie like ours and just be like, oh, there’s another way to see the desolation and another way to deal with it directly,” Kwan said.
The win for Everything Everywhere All at Once came as Hollywood and the Oscars continued to gain a foothold after several years of the pandemic and last year’s show’s scandal. While the industry has tried to revitalize cinema attendance, originality has been in short supply in the cinemas. During Oscars weekend at the box office, a “VI” defeated a “III”.
But “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a mad rush of originality with “Raccacoonie” on its head, is sure to be loved for daring to be different. And at the Oscars, maybe his win wasn’t “not normal,” as Kwan said. It could be the new normal.
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Follow AP film writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP