Re: Oscar's Best Picture 2023
 

Everything Everywhere All at Once made some Oscar history. "The Big Eight Awards" are Best Picture, Best Director, the four Acting categories, and the two screenplay categories. Obviously a film can't be nominated for both screenplay awards, it is either Original or Adapted, so the most Oscars a film can win in "The Big Eight" is seven. EEAAO won six. The only one it didn't win was Best Actor, where it had no nominee. That is more than any movie in history in those categories.

EEAAO won seven total, also winning for Best Editing. Seven wins is not anywhere close to the record of eleven shared by LOTR: The Return of the King, Titanic, Ben-Hur, and the original West Side Story, but six out of the seven biggest awards is unprecedented.

No film has ever won all four of the acting awards. EEAAO joins A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Network (1976) as the only films to have won three.

Re: Oscar's Best Picture 2023
 

I tried to watch this and I was only able to make it 45 minutes into the movie. I had a very hard time understanding what was happening and so I didn't resonate with this film. As a result, although it seemed like a foregone conclusion based on the precursor awards, I'm kind of still surprised that it won Best Picture and that it won more top major category awards than any other film in the history of the Oscars, as Holden cited above. I had heard a lot of older Academy voters didn't get it either and didn't particularly like it. It has very passionate supporters, there's no doubt about that, but it also appears that it's not a movie that is universally loved. I thought in the era of the preferential ballot, which is a rank ordered system, that a film that was divisive with many couldn't win, since a preferential ballot is a consensus choice, but this one did! Why do you all think that is? Was this film not in fact as divisive as some of us may have been led to believe? Why was it as successful as it was, not only in Best Picture, but also for 6 of the top awards?

With Everything Everywhere All At Once I feel similarly to when Shape of Water won.


I'm delighted for the people involved since I think it is a really good film and I'm glad it wasn't beaten by something less deserving like Avatar or The Fabelmans.


But at the same time I am braced for the inevitable backlash. It is very much not a film for everyone, in fact that is part of its appeal to the people who enjoy it, I think, that feeling of 'hey, this is my kind of weird'.


I like that there's room for mass appeal films (easy to aim for, hard to do really well) and these quirkier ones when giving out awards, that we seem to have moved on from the era of obvious Oscar bait type movies.