Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Best Picture Oscar win is a triumph

Everything Everywhere All At OnceIt was the Best Picture Winner at 2023 Oscars. The film also won six additional awards: Best Director, Original Screenplay and Film Editing. For anyone who watched this year’s ceremony, where the audience went wild every time the film was mentioned, the Best Picture win stopped being a surprise about halfway through the show. But a year ago, no one could have watched Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s multiverse masterpiece and anticipated this kind of response or recognition — not from the notoriously stodgy Academy.

All You NeedInitial impressions were that the film was intended to attract a passionate, small audience. The film seemed to be at the very least a secret cult movie. It played like a bigger and brighter version of the Daniels’ first movie, Swiss Army Man —A movie that is loved by certain people, but not enough to be popular with a wider audience. They were certainly not Academy-worthy films.

As word spread about the movie and the film was in theatres for weeks, it began to shift the narrative. There were so many reasons to see the film as a collective feel-good experience for cinema fans: Ke Huy Quan’s triumphant return to film; Michelle Yeoh landing a leading role worthy of her acting skills, as well as her martial-arts skills. Jamie Lee Curtis is back in comedy, playing a rare role. Majority Asian actors tell the nuanced and emotional stories they seldom get to see on American cinema. The story contains many Easter eggs and jokes aimed specifically at cinephiles. The movie became more popular and had a greater impact on the public’s opinion. It was the first box office hit worth $100 million for A24, a small distributor of arthouse films.

By the time Oscar nominations arrived, the film was in all 11 categories. All You Need was looking like a real rarity in Oscars history: a serious Academy Awards contender that was also a comedy and an action-thriller — and above all, a It’s weird, weird movie.

At least in one sense All You NeedA classic Oscar movie. It puts its actors through an emotional rollercoaster ride, and ends up giving them a positive, humanistic ending. The movie is not Oscar-worthy in any other way. Gags about dildos and buttplugs, S&M and condiment-squirting hot-dog fingers, all puncture the kind of self-important gravity that usually scores big at the annual ceremony. Genre films are almost never recognized by the Academy outside of technical categories. However, All You NeedScience fiction Fantasy that embraces alternate universes. Jumping between worlds is the theme. The film challenges viewers to keep up the pace.

Just getting Academy attention in the first place makes the Daniels’ film a triumph. It’s the kind of project that Should win Oscars far more often — a technically stunning, ambitious movie that deliberately pushes the envelope of what cinema can do. It’s consciously designed to go further and faster than most movies, to challenge the audience as well as the medium. And it’s designed above all to make the world a better place, to push viewers to come away wanting to be better, kinder people.

But that isn’t what the Academy usually honors. The Academy continues to honor historical dramas and other prestige films, even in this era of expanded Best Picture, which was created to attract viewers. Even when the very occasional authentic oddity pulls off a Best Picture win — Guillermo del Toro’s Water Shape in 2017, for instance — it’s still always a grave and serious film, one that feels like a prestige drama with fantastical elements tacked on.

There is no one to accuse All You NeedYou are that. It’s a movie that genuinely challenges the medium, instead of imitating familiar styles and stories. The Academy needs to be looking at it every year for the same innovation and excellence. The Academy, a notoriously conservative awards body, is proud to acknowledge it and give it a reward.

But it’s also a triumph for downright weird cinema. If success continues to breed imitation in Hollywood, maybe at this time in a few years, we’ll see more movies picking up on the Daniels’ energy and hilarity the way, for instance, animators across a variety of studios have picked up on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s visual experiments and boundary-pushing animation. You can now enjoy the bizarre cinematography of the hot-dog fingers, and cosmic bagels.