‘Best Actress’ Oscar 2023 winner: Michelle Yeoh wins the award
Michelle Yeoh has won the Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’ for the 2022 movie Everything, Everywhere All at Once, claiming the Oscar ahead of the likes of Cate Blanchett, Ana de Armas and Michelle Williams.
Starring alongside Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis, Yeoh led Everything, Everywhere All at Once with a magnificent performance, well deserving of an Academy Award. A favourite of critics and audiences alike in 2022, Everything, Everywhere All at Once was a masterful movie that told the story of an unlikely woman’s adventures in the multiverse as she tries to quell the fears and insecurities of her daughter.
In our full-length review of the movie, we stated: “Tossed into a multiverse adventure against her will, Quan’s ability becomes imperative as she is tasked with saving the entire multiverse from destruction at the hands of an omnipotent being called Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu). If this weren’t stressful enough for Evelyn, she must also deal with the end of her marriage to her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). On top of this chaos, she also faces the difficulty of raising her troubled teenage daughter Joy while traversing an interrogative audit by the IRS”.
“Thanks to the chaos of Daniels’ new movie, many genres and tropes are active within the aptly named Everything Everywhere All at Once, however, the breadth of these genres, stuffed into an over-gratuitous two hours and 15 minutes, forces the film to never properly tackle its themes with the rigour that we, as audience members, ought to expect”.
Yeoh joins the long list of esteemed recent Oscar winners, including The Eyes of Tammy Faye’s Jessica Chastain, Nomadland’s Frances McDormand and Judy’s Renée Zellweger. These most recent winners join a long list of influential winners, including the likes of Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Jodie Foster, Jane Fonda, Julie Andrews and Elizabeth Taylor.
How Michelle Yeoh won an Oscar for Everything, Everywhere All at Once
The star of Daniels’ philosophical blockbuster, Yeoh provides the beating heart of Everything, Everywhere All at Once, delivering a heartfelt performance as well as a physically compelling one, playing her part in a number of thrilling action set pieces.
Embracing nihilism, the Daniels create a film that is difficult to ridicule, despite it containing many divisive moments of comedy. Of course, not every viewer will be on board with the film’s eccentric sense of humour. The directors spend a lot of time exploring a world in which everyone has hot dogs for fingers, as well as an alternate universe that features ‘Raccacoonie’, a racoon version of Pixar’s rodent chef in Ratatouille.
Refusing to deny nihilism outright, Everything Everywhere All at Once argues that the feeling of worthlessness and apathy that comes with the philosophical concept can be combatted by embracing absurdity, losing your ego and finding empathy in this shared mortal connection. In such a meaningless universe, the love Evelyn (Yeoh) shares with her daughter and husband is the source of true meaning, finding mutual understanding and acceptance in their shared experience of the absurdity of modern life.
The win for Yeoh marks one of the most significant moments at the 95th Academy Awards. Take a look at the trailer for Everything, Everywhere All at Once below.
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