Why Everything Everywhere All At Once Will Win Best Picture
'Tis the night before the Oscars, and for the second consecutive year-- but just the third time ever! -- no less than 10 films are ramping up their campaigns in a last-minute push for the top prize of them all, Best Picture. The biggest award has the potential to be either one of the most anticlimactic or most surprising result in recent years.
This fact, as well as the Oscars' less predictable preferential voting system means that no nominee can truly be counted out of the race. Spotlight's and Moonlight's back-to-back upsets in 2016 and 2017, Parasite's stunner in 2020, and CODA's late surge last year all taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 12th.
The last nominee in our Best Picture previews is both the race's frontrunner, and the one whose plot is probably the hardest to condense into a small paragraph. I'll give it a try anyway: Everything Everywhere All At Once follows Michelle Yeoh's Evelyn Wang. When we first meet her, we get to know her as a Chinese-American immigrant whose struggling laundromat is leading to audits by the IRS and strained relationships with her husband, father, and daughter. Soon, however, we learn via her husband Waymond that there are multiverse versions of herself (as well as everybody else in her life), and that these multiverse 'Evelyns' must use their specialized, advanced skills to prevent an all-powerful being from destroying the multiverse.
Got all that? If you think that all sounds like a wild premise for a successful movie, and especially for an Oscar contender, you're not wrong. This plot is the furthest possible thing from traditional 'Oscar bait,' which is in part why so many people have expressed reservations about its potential to win top honors, even as the movie continues to rack up wins on the awards circuit. But I think the skeptics are examining that angle incorrectly: the Academy Awards' ongoing struggle to stay relevant likely means they're much more open to awarding a winner that would be groundbreaking and exciting in so many ways. An indie, relatively small-budget, wild multiverse film? Featuring a predominantly Asian cast? With a slate of co-directors and cast members that have never even been nominated for Oscars, let alone won (even including veterans Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis)? That pulls a whole host of levers for them.
But really, one only has to look at the results of this awards cycle to understand why Everything Everywhere is in pole position. Before awards season really ramped up, I definitely pegged this as a surefire nominee; there was no ignoring how much of a cultural *moment* it was, on a level that we arguably haven't seen from a Best Picture contender since Get Out several years ago. The film ended up grossing $70 million, a crazy number for an indie film, and maintained Twitter buzz throughout pretty much the entirety of 2022. What I don't think anyone could have seen coming, though, is their sheer domination of the awards circuit, to a level where it enters the Academy Awards as the runaway favorite for Best Picture. The film is already the most-awarded ever, surpassing the record long held by The Lord of the Tings: The Return Of The King, and is only the fifth film in history to sweep the top prize in all four major guilds (Directors', Producers', Screen Actors', and Writers'). As you might expect, the four previous to do it-- American Beauty, No Country For Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire, and Argo --all went on to take the Oscar as well. In addition to the guilds, Everything Everywhere claimed top honors at the Critics' Choice, Independent Spirit, and Satellite Awards, as well as from multiple major cities' film critics association. The train doesn't seem like it's stopping any time soon, and at this point, it almost feels that if a win this inevitable doesn't come to fruition, it can only be explained as an intentionally cynical decision by the Academy.
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