‘Best Picture’ Oscar 2023 winner: ‘Everything, Everywhere All at Once’ wins biggest prize
The Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert movie Everything, Everywhere All at Once has claimed the award for ‘Best Picture’ at the 95th Academy Awards, beating out the likes of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking.
Starring Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis, the movie was a favourite of critics in 2022, well-earning its place among this year’s nominees for ‘Best Picture’. An intense cinematic delight, the film tells the story of a married couple and the owners of a city laundrette who are dragged into a multiversal war against their own daughter, who threatens to destroy all life on earth.
Speaking about the movie in our full-length review, we stated: “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”.
“A tender family drama takes centre stage, with the dynamic between Evelyn and her daughter becoming the heart and soul of the sprawling sci-fi. Though, despite the film’s desperate efforts, we cannot delve into the dynamic between Evelyn and Joy’s miscommunicated relationship when Joy is portrayed as the horrifically garish multiverse villain of the film”.
Everything, Everywhere All at Once joins the long list of esteemed recent Oscar winners, including Sian Heder’s CODA, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Green Book by Peter Farrelly. Such contemporary greats join a whole host of iconic filmmakers, with Clint Eastwood, Sydney Pollack, James L. Brooks, Robert Wise, and Francis Ford Coppola having claimed the award in the past.
How Everything, Everywhere All at Once won the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar
Forget fantasy epics and superhero tales, the movie multiverse is the latest cinematic trend. Born from Marvel’s popularisation of the narrative tool, as well as the bombardment of content and fake news, suggesting separate realities that seem more real than we each care to believe, multiverse stories follow characters who cross dimensions and timelines to discover an existential truth. Though many movies have used the trend before, no film has better grasped the concept’s potential than Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once.
By capitalising on the success of the modern movie multiverse, Daniels has bridged the gap between arthouse and commercial cinema, providing something audiences can celebrate and critics can applaud for its cinematic ambition. Though, the multiverse acts more than a mere plot device, with the endless, complex arms of Everything, Everywhere All at Once’s plot also speaking to the many realities we are seemed to be presented with every day when we log in online.
In a world of fake news, misinformation and more, the Daniels’ ‘Best Picture’ winner teaches viewers to merely be true to themselves, embrace the absurdity of modern life and choose love over anything else. It’s a pertinent story with a timeless message.
The win for Everything, Everywhere All at Once marks the end of the 95th Academy Awards, which have been made all the more memorable by a typical array of surprises, snubs and more. Take a look at the trailer for the ‘Best Picture’ winner below.
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