The Oscars Pave a Path Forward

It’s worth zooming out a bit to consider the performance of Everything Everywhere All at Once at Sunday night’s Academy Awards—a dominance of truly historic proportions for this nearly 95-year-old awards show. It wasn’t even that much of a surprise, after the movie achieved similar success with various industry guilds over the past few months. As we discuss in our annual Little Gold Men Oscars postmortem (listen above), this film—with talking rocks and hot dog fingers and multiverses—was the overwhelming industry favorite. Yes, these are very much not your parents’ Oscars. Inside the Dolby Theatre, evidence of just how much has changed, even since Green Book, was, well, everywhere.

But I keep going back to the groups beyond the Oscars. The unions of tens of thousands of film and TV professionals who have often leaned more conservative than the arty Academy, guilds whose sheer size often leads to bland consensus. Organizations for actors, directors, producers, writers, and more resoundingly decided on Everything Everywhere All at Once. The Academy has made great strides to diversify and expand its membership, but if we look back at how this season has evolved, it’s Hollywood as a whole that tells the real story of transformation, and maybe evolution, here. The Oscars merely sealed that envelope. 

In its own way, this year’s Oscars felt like a vote for Hollywood’s future. Everything Everywhere All at Once was a box-office phenomenon for A24, grossing over $100 million globally on an indie budget and achieving a full theatrical run, to say nothing of its robust life on digital since the summer. On the campaign trail this season, Guillermo del Toro said in a conversation moderated by Deadline, “When I see a film like Everything Everywhere All at Once, and I realize how much it is impacting the generation of my kids, and how they embrace it in the same way I embraced The Graduate when I was their age, I love that.” I think many of his peers agreed with that sentiment, that the film signaled a more inclusive, emotionally resonant path for (wild) originality in Hollywood going forward. 

Beyond it, rather than a crafts sweep like we saw last year with Dune, the Oscars spread the wealth—more accurately representing what, for most, the year in film looked like. Take the two biggest movies of the year, neither of which went home empty-handed: Top Gun: Maverick won for its roaring sound design, while Avatar: The Way of Water was rewarded for its astonishing visual effects. The last big best-picture nominee, Elvis, was snubbed despite a strong nominations haul—my biggest surprise of the night. That can mostly be attributed to the surging affection for All Quiet on the Western Front, the German war film that played its own unique role this season, organically capturing the hearts of craftspeople as it sat on Netflix’s backburner, while the streamer’s most heavily campaigned contenders fizzled out. At this point, even if an unusual choice—I wouldn’t exactly call All Quiet the most acclaimed or buzziest streaming movie of the year—the Academy cannot and should not ignore streaming, given the sizable chunk of the industry it now represents. (In that sense, last year’s win for CODA felt forward-looking as well.)

The only movie to win an above-the-line award outside of Everything Everywhere and The Whale’s Fraser was Women Talking, for Sarah Polley’s superlative adaptation. Surprisingly, given its tough road on the circuit, the UAR-MGM release was the only indie of a certain prestige class to nab any gold at all on Sunday. I found it particularly fascinating that Polley met such an enthusiastic standing ovation, given the smallness and divisiveness of her movie. Her story in Hollywood, from traumatized child actor to highly regarded filmmaker—challenging the way sets and productions are run—got a real moment, and this felt in its own way like a vote for a brighter Hollywood future, as Polley alluded to in her speech. 

Less optimistically, perhaps: The respectful admiration for critically acclaimed box-office duds The Fabelmans, Tár, and The Banshees of Inisherin remained just that—of the 22 nominations between them, not a single win to show for it. The applause was notably tepid for the trio as they kept coming up on nomination rolls, relative to other movies, and you have to wonder about the town’s temperature for this sort of filmmaking right now. Each movie, in this writer’s opinion, is tremendously worthy and exciting. But just as they did with the broadcast itself, the Academy seemed to listen to its critics and try to meet a rapidly changing moviegoing public where it’s at. They could’ve done worse than deliver a historic night to the movie that, in more ways than one, defined American cinema in 2022.