Everything Everywhere All at Once is a sci-fi, action, and comedy movie directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, known together as The Daniels. It’s about Evelyn Wang, her husband Waymond Wang, and their daughter Joy Wang. The family leads a monotonous life in the laundromat they own and Waymond has decided to divorce Evelyn. When we meet Evelyn, she is overworked and exhausted, struggling to keep up with her daily life. She and Waymond attend an appointment with an IRS auditor, and Evelyn’s world is turned around as she is informed she is part of an infinite “multiverse” and is tasked with saving all these worlds.
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The story is touching, hilarious, and bonkers and each character is impressively well-acted by stars Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy-Quan, and Stephanie Hsu. Film critic Clarisse Loughrey sums the movie up well in a review for The Independent, saying, “Rich performances collide with big ideas, wrapped in a nuanced understanding of how we treat each other.” It earned $104 million at the box office with a budget of just $25 million, becoming independent studio A24’s highest-grossing movie ever. The fact that it appeals to audiences large enough to make that kind of money while still pleasing indie movie fans speaks volumes about its success. After earning a whopping 11 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Director, will this front-runner take home the big win? Or will Everything Everywhere All at Once stumble at the last hurdle?
Genre Bias in The Academy
A24
Something that may not be obvious if you haven’t spent time looking through Best Picture winner lists is that a sci-fi movie has never won the award. There’s been a handful of nominations for this genre of movies including Spike Jonze’s Her, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. In 1971, A Clockwork Orange became the first-ever sci-fi movie to be nominated for Best Picture, so the fact that there was no mention of the sci-fi genre for almost half of the Academy Awards’ lifetime says a lot. The same goes for most genres beyond dramas, war movies and musicals which are all favorites of the Academy.
Horror movies, thrillers, action and adventure movies, and fantasy movies are all less likely to receive a nomination, let alone win the award. It may not be fair, but it does create a rather large barrier to entry for Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is both sci-fi and action heavy. Reporter Tim Grierson, writing for Rolling Stone about the Academy’s bias against horror, says, “the trick [to being taken seriously] has usually been to fool Oscar voters into not necessarily thinking of them as horror films.” Unfortunately for Everything Everywhere All at Once, there’s not a lot of subtlety to its sci-fi and action aspects, making them hard to avoid. It’s always possible that this could be the movie that breaks the sci-fi curse, but there is another factor at play that makes this unlikely.
The Preferential Ballot System
In 2009, the Academy changed the voting system for the Best Picture category. When simply awarding the movie with the most votes you can come across issues if there are many movies on the ballot card. For example, anywhere between five and ten movies can end up nominated for this category, so when there are as many as ten, the vote can easily get split between two or three of the most popular choices, and a seemingly out-of-place movie can take the crown.
So, in order to combat this, the Academy introduced a preferential system in its place. This means that voters must list the nominees in order of preference and if their number one choice receives the least number of votes, their vote is transferred to their next choice. The process of counting and transferring votes continues until one movie has 50% of the votes. As a result of this, the Best Picture winner tends to be the most liked movie, rather than the most loved movie, which explains some of the stranger choices from the last decade or so.
Some thought it odd that recent winner CODA beat The Power of the Dog, but when considered through this lens it makes a lot of sense. The Power of the Dog was more divisive whereas CODA was easier to enjoy, if not necessarily love. This puts Everything Everywhere All at Once in a precarious position because of its intensity and in-your-face style, some voters may have been really put off. However, something like Spielberg’s The Fabelmans has a much more easily digestible premise and style, which could give it an edge with the preferential ballot.
