Listen, this was always going to happen this way. After all, if you look at the crop of Best Picture nominees at the Academy Awards 2023, there was no film people felt as strongly about as Everything Everywhere All At Once.
While there are of course fans of each, and the world loved films such as Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick, EEAAO was something different entirely–a cult film that managed to break through to the mainstream.
Emphasis on the world ‘cult’. This is a film that people don’t just like, they have based their entire personality around, with a passion for it that has rarely been seen for any film in recent memory. While it’s not a film that works with everyone, if it does work for you, you cannot stop talking about it.
So why did Everything Everywhere All At Once. win the Oscar?
First and foremost, it’s because of that–because while everyone liked the rest almost all of the rest of the crop, that kind of appreciation splits votes. The Top Gun fans liked a lot of movies. The EEAAO fans have a dedication that transcends all others, while many were alienated by the film, the people who loved it really loved it, including the top names in Hollywood.
That level of dedication from its fanbase propelled it to a win in not only in Best Picture, but in Best Director for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Supporting Actor for Ke Huy Quan, Best Actress for Michelle Yeoh, and even Best Supporting Actress for Jamie Lee Curtis.
“A24, thank you so much. You saw our weirdness and supported us for a year theatrically,” producer Jonathan Wang said on stage.
He also thanked his father, “who, like so many immigrant parents, died young.” “He is so proud of me not because of this,” Wang said, gesturing to the trophy, “but because we made this movie with what he taught me to do, which is: No person is more important than profits, and no one is more important than anyone else.”
But at the end of the day, while this is a film that makes many people feel seen, put an underserviced community front and center in a commercial genre film, it is not in fact a great movie.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is not a great movie
Everything Everywhere All At Once is not a bad film, merely an unremarkable one, a film that aims big but likely would have been better suited, and more effectively plotted, as a 22-minute Rick & Morty episode.
To its credit, gave Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan a wonderful opportunity to showcase their versatility, and their acting awards are deserved.
Unfortunately, it’s also an over-long slog that often feels like it’s trying too hard on multiple fronts, and now sports a fanbase that attacks those who don’t love it as if that makes them bad people.
It’s turned the film unwittingly into one of the key examples of what a key contingent of film appreciation has become—a shallow, boring battleground where certain cultural signifiers lead groups of people (on both sides) to declare certain art a moral good to support and a moral evil to deride (or vice versa), which does nothing but do great damage to the future of art itself.
Since when do we have to appreciate art based on what it’s trying to do, rather than what it does?
Anyways, Swiss Army Man was better.