Oscars 2023: “Everything Everywhere All at Once” dominates with seven wins

”My journey started on a boat. I ended up in a refugee camp. And somehow, I ended up here on Hollywood’s biggest stage...They say stories like this only happen in the movies. I cannot believe this is happening to me. This is the American dream!” – Best supporting actor winner Ke Huy Quan.

Everything. Everywhere. Spread out over three and a half hours.

The trippy and absurdist and subversive and fantastically wild, verse-jumping comedy/drama “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was the dominant, feel-good champion of the 95th Academy Awards, with a total of seven wins: best picture, best director and best original screenplay for the duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, best editing, best actress for Michelle Yeoh, best supporting actor for Ke Huy Quan and best supporting actress for Jamie Lee Curtis.

Wow. What an incredible accomplishment for a film that seemed to come out of nowhere and took the movie world by storm.

This year’s Oscars were filled with comeback stories, including Brendan Fraser’s win for “The Whale,” an epic, bold, authentic and heartbreakingly moving performance in a film that polarized audiences and critics. (I loved it.) After rocketing to stardom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Fraser virtually disappeared from the Hollywood spotlight for more than a decade, before giving the performance of a career and finding himself onstage, with a best actor Oscar in his hand. What a beautiful, lovely moment.

The feel-good vibe continued with Michelle Yeoh’s best actress win for “Everything…”, with Yeoh giving a wonderful acceptance speech in which she said, “Ladies, don’t let anybody ever tell you are ever past your prime. Never give up.” Perfect.

They’ve always been remarkable talents — but there was a time when a movie starring Brendan Fraser, Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis and Ke Huy Quan probably would have been a wacky road trip comedy or some such thing. What a great night for this lovely and brilliant quartet.

Even though it was a foregone conclusion Ke Huy Quan was going to take home the Academy Award for his brilliant work in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” this was still one of those Golden Oscar Moments that had everyone in the Dolby Theatre on their feet and cheering, and no doubt more than a few viewers at home tearing up. How can you not root for someone who has been through so much and was filled with so much joy for this most deserved win?

Quan’s victory was followed by another triumphant moment, when his “Everything” co-star Jamie Lee Curtis won best supporting actress. Referencing her father, Tony Curtis, who was nominated for best actor for “The Defiant Ones,” and her mother, who was nominated for best supporting actress for “Psycho,” the much admired and greatly beloved Curtis looked to the sky as she exulted in her shining moment. Good on you, Laurie Strode!

Sidebar: There was a lot of social media buzz about the look of disappointment on Angela Bassett’s face when her name wasn’t called in the supporting actress category. Hey, WHY NOT. Bassett delivered an Oscar-worthy performance (not the first time, and it won’t be the last), and she seemed to be the frontrunner until the rising tide of support for “Everything” in recent weeks. It was a very human and very real moment.

As for the Oscars as a TV show: It’s always new, and yet it always feels a little bit like a rerun — and no one will ever use terms such as “breezy” or “briskly paced” when talking about the Academy Awards. When you’re handing out 23 trophies, and you’re featuring five musical performances, and you have built-in traditions such as the “In Memoriam” segment, commercial breaks, etc., etc., you’re always looking at a running time to rival that of “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

So it went with this year’s show, which moved along at its own pace (about halfway through, host Jimmy Kimmel joked that the hour lost to Daylight Saving Time had been added to the telecast), but we did have a few electric moments, e.g., the “Naatu Naatu” performance, which brought down the house, and Lady Gaga’s stripped-down, klller rendition of “Hold My Hand.” Fantastic stuff!

The awards kicked off with Brad Pitt in “Babylon” saying, “Time to go make a movie!,” which was followed by a montage of behind-the-scenes footage and brief clips from dozens of 2023 releases reminding us of the magic of movies.

Then it was time for Kimmel to make his entrance — first via special effects trickery that put him in Tom Cruise’s jet fighter plane in “Top Gun: Maverick” and then “parachuting” from the rafters. Kimmel did a solid job, but there wasn’t a whole lot of edginess beyond some jabs at the self-involved grandiosity of this business of show, e.g., when Kimmel noted, “I also want to say that I’m happy to see that Nicole Kidman has finally been released from that abandoned AMC where she has been held captive for almost two full years now. … And thank you for encouraging people who were already at the movie theater to go to the movie theater …”

There was a Pauly Shore joke, a line about Steven Spielberg and Seth Rogen being “the Joe and Hunter Biden of Hollywood,” a corny one-liner about composer John Williams being 91 and “still scoring,” and the inevitable references to last year’s slapping incident, as when Kimmel noted, “Five Irish actors are nominated tonight. Which means the odds of another fight onstage just went way up.”

Some two hours later, Hugh Grant was referring to his own face as a particular part of the male anatomy, Elizabeth Banks was sharing the stage with the Cocaine Bear, and “All Quiet on the Western Front” was having a great night, with (deserved) wins for cinematography, international feature, production design and original score. But some THREE-plus hours later, “Everything” was everything.