It’s a little early to start talking about Oscar contenders – awards season is still a few months away and there are plenty more movies to come this year – but the Daniels’ existential, verse-jumping magnum opus Everything Everywhere All at Once has already been praised as one of the greatest movies ever made.
Academy voters rarely give genre movies the time of day, but Everything Everywhere All at Once could be one of the rare exceptions. There are a ton of categories this sci-fi comedy gem should be nominated for, from a Best Actress nod for Michelle Yeoh’s revelatory performance as Evelyn to a Best Original Screenplay nod for the Daniels’ thought-provoking storytelling and emotionally gripping character work.
Best Actress For Michelle Yeoh
Michelle Yeoh has been a screen legend throughout her decades-spanning career, but she got the chance to demonstrate more of her range than ever before with the role of Evelyn Quan Wang.
Over the years, Yeoh has played badass action heroes, lovable romantic leads, goofy comedic characters, and deeply flawed dramatic roles. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, she gets to play all of those archetypes rolled into the same moving, multiversal, multidimensional performance.
Best Director For The Daniels
It takes a razor-sharp command of the directorial craft to make a movie like Everything Everywhere All at Once work. The filmmaking duo of Daniels Kwan and Scheinert simultaneously crammed everything but the kitchen sink into their multiversal epic and remained intently focused on the characters and their relationships from start to finish.
If the Daniels received a much-deserved Best Director gong for their work on Everything Everywhere, they would become the third directing team to share the award (after Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ win for West Side Story in 1961 and Joel and Ethan Coen’s win for No Country for Old Men in 2007).
Best Cinematography For Larkin Seiple
Cinematographer Larkin Seiple did a phenomenal job of bringing the Daniels’ gonzo vision of Everything Everywhere All at Once to life. With verse-jumping and fractured realities, this movie has a visual language of its own.
From Jobu Tupaki’s superpowers to the everything bagel at the center of the universe to a two-shot of subtitled rocks sitting in a peaceful, lifeless universe, Seiple filled Everything Everywhere All at Once with some of the most striking visuals of the year so far.
Best Actor For Ke Huy Quan
Much like Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan got a chance to show off more range than ever before in Everything Everywhere All at Once. He nails the comic one-liners that defined his most iconic roles, Data and Short Round, but he also nails the dramatic nuance of an exhausted spouse on the brink of a divorce.
Whether he’s trying to repair his crumbling marriage or imploring an army of multiversal henchmen to stop fighting or saying he’d be happy to do “laundry and taxes” with Evelyn in another life, Quan gives a truly engaging, emotionally gripping turn as Waymond Wang.
Best Film Editing For Paul Rogers
The editing of Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of its greatest strengths. Cutting all over the place, jumping from universe to universe, the editing of this movie could’ve been an incomprehensible mess.
But thanks to the impeccable work of editor Paul Rogers, the audience isn’t lost for a second. Rogers is a shoo-in for an Academy Award nomination (and, hopefully, an actual award) for Best Film Editing.
Best Original Screenplay For The Daniels
The Daniels’ script for Everything Everywhere All at Once is jam-packed with mind-boggling ideas, from verse-jumping to a parody of Ratatouille to an all-consuming bagel at the center of reality, and against all odds, they managed to pull all those ideas together in a cohesive plot.
If the operative word in the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay is “original,” then Everything Everywhere All at Once is a no-brainer for a nomination. There’s never been a script quite like this. No concept is too bonkers for this movie, but the emotions still ring true.
Best Supporting Actress For Stephanie Hsu
Stephanie Hsu gives a revelatory dual performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once. She plays Joy Wang as a painfully relatable, disillusioned Generation Z kid and Jobu Tupaki as an unsettlingly sadistic, ultimately sympathetic, all-powerful multiversal overlord.
Hsu seamlessly embodies both of these roles throughout the movie. If the two characters weren’t identical, audiences could be convinced that two separate actors were giving two separate performances.
Best Original Score For Son Lux
The musical score in Everything Everywhere All at Once is inextricably tied to the emotional connection of the movie. From the beautifully subtle melodies that underscore the family tensions to the mesmerizing wall of sound that plays over the verse-jumping, Everything Everywhere’s score is full of unforgettable compositions that pair perfectly with the on-screen spectacle.
The score was composed by Son Lux, a three-person experimental band consisting of Ryan Lott, Ian Chang, and Rafiq Bhatia. The music took years to complete and contains over 100 different cues. After all that hard work, Son Lux has more than earned an Oscar nod.
Best Picture
The Academy tends to save its Best Picture nominations for biopics and straightforward dramas about social issues, but Everything Everywhere All at Once is undeniably one of the best films of the year. It touches on plenty of poignant social issues, from divorce to prejudice to existentialism, without sacrificing a sense of popcorn-munching fun.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most wildly original, deeply moving, and devilishly complex movies in years. It’s a cinematic paradox; it’s both a hugely entertaining genre cocktail and an intimate, emotionally engaging character drama.
