Everything Everwhere All at Once Leads Oscar Nominations

The Academy Awards have taken a hit in recent years. Covid restrictions made moviegoing less common, reducing the cultural cachet of Hollywood films. This accelerated the American film industry’s bifurcation into little-seen art films and Marvel-style blockbusters (many of them sequels) — leaving increasingly less in between. With Oscars mostly flowing to the former, the prestige of such awards has faded, and the ceremony itself has lost considerable ratings.

It remains to be seen if any of these trends will be reversed or even meaningfully ameliorated. 2022 had some bright spots, but the American film industry continues to struggle. Which is why it was a pleasant surprise to see Everything Everywhere All at Once, one of 2022’s best films, lead the pack of this year’s Oscar nominations, including those for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and multiple acting nominations (Best Actress for star Michelle Yeoh’s stunning performance, Best Supporting Actor for Ke Huy Quan, and Best Supporting Actress for Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis). I quite liked Everything Everywhere All at Once (as have general audiences, who have made this quirky interdimensional action-comedy and existentialist drama studio A24’s highest-grossing film). As I wrote in my review, it defied my ability to liken it to anything else:

Maybe it’s like a live-action adaptation of the Adult Swim cartoon Rick and Morty. Or maybe it’s like a combination of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Matrix, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Or maybe it’s like a five-year-old became an expert in theoretical physics and attempted to explain it to a three-year-old — or perhaps more like a fever dream of Stephen Hawking after he stayed up all night pounding energy drinks and watching kung fu movies. Or . . . oh, forget it. There’s nothing quite like Everything Everywhere All at Once. And I’m glad that, in this universe, both it and I exist, so that I was able to give it a watch. If, like me, you also exist, I heartily recommend doing the same.

Top Gun: Maverick, another film I enjoyed last year, earned an impressive six nominations, including Best Picture, somewhat bridging the increasingly large chasm between cinematic quality and box-office receipts that has lately plagued the Academy. It didn’t used to: See Oscar sweeps for such hit films as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Slumdog Millionaire, and Titanic. This is a salutary development, and not just because Top Gun: Maverick is a good movie (despite being a sequel). As I wrote:

The most-thrilling aspects of the original remain, and are, if anything, upgraded. The flight choreography, both in training and in the climax, is clearly and thrillingly depicted. There was a thoroughgoing emphasis, throughout the production, on verisimilitude: The actors went through a kind of boot camp, and actual planes were used as much as possible, with CGI, the bane of the modern blockbuster, employed not as a substitute for spectacle but as a sparing complement to it.

Crucially, in between such sequences, Top Gun: Maverick is actually interesting. The seemingly ageless Tom Cruise leans into the passage of time in the sequel, constantly trying to defy his reputation as a “fossil,” holding on to those he cares about (Kilmer returns as Iceman, and the story touchingly accommodates Kilmer’s own physical decline). He also deals with past trauma, most obviously lingering guilt about his role in the death of Goose. This trauma is embodied in the person of Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, Goose’s son (Miles Teller, in an unexpectedly impressive and uncanny performance), whom Cruise is forced to train as part of the high-stakes mission that gathers the nation’s best pilots back to the eponymous flight academy. In terms of both spectacle and emotional heft, Top Gun: Maverick exceeds its predecessor in every way, while lovingly building on it.

It is also in the Academy’s interest to at least make people think that Top Gun: Maverick could win awards, as it might get people to tune in to the ceremony. Its nominations — and especially any wins — could, moreover, help convince general audiences that the Academy’s imprimatur does occasionally align with their tastes, as the movie is currently the most successful domestic release of 2022. It has also prospered internationally (especially in the U.K., Australia, Japan, and South Korea, nations of strategic significance to the U.S.) despite its lacking a release in Russia or China (for the latter of which it was deemed too pro-American to release).

I was a bad moviegoer in 2022; the sort of person who used to make a habit of it but has fallen away, and the kind that Hollywood is probably desperate to lure back into theaters. I’ve seen basically none of the other films nominated for anything, except for The Batman (which I detested). That includes Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (even though I wrote about it before its release) and even Avatar: The Way of Water, currently the second-highest-grossing film of 2022 in America and already No. 1 worldwide (a China release helps). Avatar: The Way of Water was also nominated for Best Picture, as well as for three other awards. The Academy’s-self-interest arguments I make in favor of Top Gun: Maverick’s nominations and potential victories apply to Avatar’s being awarded as well.

Yet, despite the franchise’s inexplicable but indubitable popularity (I am done second-guessing James Cameron, at this point), the cultural footprint of its movies does remain weirdly undetectable. (Avatar watchers: the new “silent majority”?) As Ross Douthat wrote in his review of The Way of Water:

The new Avatar has received excellent reviews, as did the first one; not everyone but almost everyone seems to enjoy these movies, and anyone who doubted that audiences would be there for the long-delayed sequel has been proven wrong. But the people noting the lack of a “cultural footprint” for the franchise still have a point; the Avatar movies show you more amazing sights than our rote superhero spectacles, but even more than Marvel’s movies they have the feel of amusement-park attractions, amazing to experience but not something that you remember afterward for character, or dialogue, or theme.

Maybe it’s an inevitable function of making your heroes (and, this time, your villains) immense CGI aliens, or maybe it’s a function of writing and casting (Cameron is saddled with Worthington, a pure dud as Sully, in the space occupied by Arnie and Kate-and-Leo in his classics), but all the characters in these movies feel like, well, avatars — warm bodies that we, the audience, get to half-occupy for three hours and ten minutes for the sake of the Pandora Experience, but whose fates and faces fade as soon as we go back out into our world.

At any rate, I am marginally more interested this year than I have been in recent years in who wins those golden statuettes. But not enough to want to watch the Oscars ceremony in real time.