Review: The 95th Academy Awards

Every Oscar All at Once

So the 95th Academy Awards took place almost a month ago and are now out of the collective consciousness, but I’ll write about them anyway because, well, why not. They weren’t all that bad, really, except for when certain winners repeatedly kept getting their mics cut-off before they could even begin their acceptance speech, which I thought was both unnecessary and disrespectful. They have time for Jimmy Kimmel’s terrible audience engagement, but can’t give people thirty seconds of airtime to thank their families?

How much I enjoy an award show usually depends on two things: a) how entertaining the show itself was, and b) who all won. For the first part, most speeches of the night went smoothly enough. They were fun and heartfelt. Kimmel, on the other hand, had a solid opening monologue but overstayed his welcome as the show went on. Meanwhile, in what is definitely a first, Disney managed to feature a movie trailer within the show - thus making sure that me and many others will go out of our way not to watch it - and both Naatu Naatu and The Elephant Whisperers actually won (!), so this was a great night for India.

As for the second part, while I enjoy watching the Oscars every year, I didn’t have strong feelings about the show this time because I hadn’t seen most of the nominated work. So I didn’t know what snubs to be mad it, which, let’s face it, is half the fun of discussing award shows anyway. Usually I binge-watch all nominated movies the week before the ceremony, which coincidentally is exactly how I study for exams as well.

But no matter, it’s the Oscars, so there’s always stuff to be mad at. As is custom, a bunch of films (like Nope) got shut out completely this year, but the most glaring snub was that The Batman didn’t get nominated for Best Cinematography. That would be like if 2014’s The Lego Movie hadn’t gotten nominated for Best Animated Fil- oh, wait.

I was also not happy with the Navalny win for Best Documentary Feature. This is the category that gets politicized most often, because it’s one of the few based explicitly on current social issues. Considering everything that’s been going on between the US and Russia, is it really a surprise that a film about an anti-Putin journalist won an Academy Award in 2023? (This feels similar to how Icarus, another doc that exposed Russian corruption, won in 2017.) As of next week I’m going to fly to Moscow to shoot my own film - it’s just a recording of myself yelling “I hate this place!” in the streets for an hour. I’ll collect my Oscar next year.

It’s possible that Navalny is a genuinely great movie. But I was rooting for two documentaries in particular, although I haven’t seen either one: the first was All That Breathes (trailer), a rare Indian entry to be nominated in this category, and the second was Fire of Love (trailer), which just about looks like the most unique film ever made. (Just look at its poster!) I promise I will catch up on these soon. (Spoilers: he didn’t.)

As for the other winners, most were expected and the show went pretty predictably in that aspect. At this point James Cameron could a hire a high school drama club to act out a sock-puppet show for Avatar 3 and it would still be guaranteed a Best Visual Effects win. Guillermo del Toro continued collecting Oscars like Infinity Stones, making his Pinocchio the first stop-motion movie to win Best Animated Film in quite a while. Tom Cruise was noticeably absent from the show, presumably busy jumping out of airplanes or shooting a running sequence for whatever exquisite piece of cinema he’s cooking up next, that insane human/machine.

But forget all that. Most importantly there was only one movie that was the main story of Oscar night, and the only one that seemingly mattered. Everything Everywhere All At Once (EEAAO from here on), the A24 action-drama-sci-fi-thriller - what genre does this film not occupy? - swept the awards and won in every major category, including Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay, and three out of the four acting categories.

And it’s not a good movie.

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A scene from EEAAO

I’ve never enjoyed being a hater but I never came close to liking EEAAO. Which is strange, because it’s by far the most unanimously acclaimed film of 2022. Twitter hasn’t stopped talking about it, at one point it was the highest rated film ever on Letterboxd, and apparently it’s also the most awarded film of all time. I’m clearly in a very small minority here.

In case you haven’t seen it, EEAAO is about a Chinese American immigrant, Evelyn Wang, who runs a laundromat with her husband. She is soon “swept up in an insane adventure, where she alone can save what’s important to her by connecting with the lives she could have led in other universes.” (Trailer here.)

When I hate any movie it’s usually because it was too boilerplate: it had the same emotional beats, the same stale CGI-fest-mashups, the same boring tropes. With EEAAO it was (refreshingly) the opposite: I didn’t like the exact things that made it unique.

What’s sad is that the film showed so much promise early on. For the first twenty or so minutes, I was invested in Evelyn’s family drama. I was ready to be blown away by an adventure (presumably) about alternate realities and regret and choices taken and untaken.

What I got instead was a juvenile visual assault on my senses that neither gave its story time to breathe, nor gave it the seriousness and maturity it deserved. The film added up to two hours of mindless action, asinine humour made worse by gags that never seemed to end, and a general overbearing sensation that it was all too much to take in, really. (Just like that very sentence.) I felt like Dave Bowman being bombarded by the vortex of light at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, only this time it wasn’t as fun. For all its faults, Everything Everywhere All At Once certainly lived up to its title.

Ebert’s law states that a movie is not about what it is about; it is about how it is about it. This should’ve been a more meditative, simpler film, instead of an overstuffed extravaganza of creatively unbound artistic choices, most of which weren’t cute, clever, or profound in any way. I just couldn’t vibe with the film’s tone. The ‘laundry and taxes’ line was the one and only memorable moment in the entire thing.

But. But! Every single aspect of the film was decidedly original. EEAAO is unapologetically itself and like nothing else out there. It is a fundamentally weird work of art - something most people aren’t used seeing on the big screen anymore. Which is why, in spite of all my criticisms, I’m glad it won big on Oscar night. Because weird-bad is always better than boilerplate-bad.

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EEAAO cast and crew

What you need to understand is that indie films like this one, made by idiosyncratic misfits like the Daniels, have never been serious award contenders. Movies that actually win Best Picture have usually been period pieces, war-is-like,-so-bad-you-guys-films, musicals, racism-is-like,-so-bad-you-guys-films, biopics, and films about show business itself. Giving Best Picture to an action, horror, science fiction, or a comedy movie? Unthinkable.

And yet: EEAAO covered all of those genres and actually won.

Everyone knows that showbiz awards are superfluous and inherently meaningless - he said, after writing a whole piece about them - and you could argue that the Best Picture Oscar is merely symbolic. But in an industry that’s all about projecting a certain image, there’s nothing “mere” about symbols. Oscar voters aren’t film critics or journalists, but people who work within the industry itself. Who wins at these shows is, in a way, a statement by Hollywood insiders about what kind of films they support and want to see more of.

Which is why it feels like such a downer when a Green Book or a Crash wins one of these things. Is this really the kind of “art” Hollywood wants to endorse? Are these the kinds of films filmmakers want to make? For all its flaws, I will take the far out eccentricities of EEAAO over the insipid snoozefest that is The King’s Speech any day of the week. My hatred for preachy moralizing Oscar-bait goes far beyond my dislike for failed but creative experiments.

Also, people remember the films that go on to win Best Picture. The one and only reason Crash ever comes up in conversation today is because of how upsetting it was that such a bad film could win any award at all, let alone get nominated.

No doubt that there’s marketing and money and politics involved in winning Oscars. I don’t know what behind the scenes magic A24 did to promote their film. But even accounting for all of that, something about it has clearly resonated with people. Because throughout the history of cinema, there have been EEAAO’s before - mid budget auteuristic genre films that people really loved - that never got this far on the awards circuit.

Which is why the 95th Academy Awards were one of the good ones. Yeah, there was nothing particularly great about the show. Yeah, no one got slapped this time. (That’s a good thing, actually.) Previous years have had funnier hosts (including Kimmel himself), more entertaining ceremonies, shows with bigger twists and better winners. But something rare happened this year: a deeply risky, eccentric, and unabashedly original film swept the show and won Best Picture, and that is ultimately a very good thing for the future of cinema.