“Everything Everywhere All at Once” dominated at the 95th Academy Awards Sunday night, winning seven Oscars including three of four acting awards, Best Director, and Best Picture.
Summary
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” dominated at the 95th Academy Awards Sunday night, winning seven Oscars including three of four acting awards, Best Director, and Best Picture.
- “Everything Everywhere All at Once” stars Michelle Yeoh, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance, as a mom and laundromat owner who must access different versions of herself from across the multiverse to save the world.
- This year’s Best Picture winner was just the second movie from directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who became the first directing duo to snag the Best Director award since the Coen Brothers won for directing “No Country for Old Men.” Scheinert dedicated their win “to the moms of the world.”
- Brendan Fraser and Ke Huy Quan both mounted tremendous career comebacks on Sunday night, winning the Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively.
- Fraser won Best Actor for his portrayal of a 600-pound gay English teacher desperate to reconnect with his daughter in “The Whale.” This was Fraser’s first Oscar nomination since his career took off in the 1990s in films like the blockbuster “Mummy” trilogy before largely disappearing from public view until recently.
- After his breakout performance as Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” Ke Huy Quan took a long break from acting due to the lack of opportunities for Asian-American actors.
- Quan returned to acting after the success of the 2018 hit “Crazy Rich Asians,” and his role as the doting husband of Michelle Yeoh’s character who must also harness the other versions of himself in the multiverse to help Yeoh’s character save the world.
- “My journey started on a boat. I spent a year in a refugee camp and somehow I ended up here on Hollywood’s biggest stage,” Quan, a refugee from Vietnam who came to the United States as a child, said in his acceptance speech.
- “They say stories like this only happen in the movies. I can’t believe this is happening to me. This is the American dream.”
- CNN covered the acceptance speech from Jamie Lee Curtis after she won her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “Everything Everywhere.” Curtis paid tribute to the “genre movies” that made her career and to her parents, who were both nominated for Academy Awards but never won.
- The Washington Post put together “10 things to know” about the 2023 ceremony, including all the jokes about the infamous Will Smith slap and the good night for “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which won Best International Film and three other Oscars for cinematography, score, and production design.
- The New York Times covered the best and worst moments, including Michelle Yeoh’s history-making win as the first Asian American woman to win Best Actress. The Times considered the guest appearance from “Cocaine Bear” to be a “worst moment,” but the bear is in the eye of the beholder.
- National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar argued “Top Gun: Maverick” was the Best Picture of 2022 even if it didn’t win. Blehar wrote, “Maverick is one of the more unique beasts seen in Hollywood in recent years: an authentic action blockbuster that conceals shocking thematic depths within its nominally crowd-pleasing skin.”
- The New York Post noted Yeoh’s acceptance speech included a not-so-subtle dig at CNN’s Don Lemon. Apparently referencing his comments that Nikki Haley is not “in her prime.” Yeoh said, “This is proof that dreams, dream big, and dreams do come true. And ladies, don’t let anybody tell you you’re ever past your prime.”
- The Wall Street Journal covered the latest fashion trend at this year’s Oscars: the “Naked Dress.” As the Journal wrote, “The Naked Dress, as it has come to be called, may be the red-carpet phenomenon of the past year, but it has roots in fashion going back decades, from Marilyn Monroe’s 1962 “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” nude gown (reworn to last year’s Met Gala by Kim Kardashian, and echoed in Ana de Armas’s nude Oscar looks this season) to Kate Moss’s 1993 accidentally transparent slip dress. To qualify, a dress made of lace, tulle, or other translucent material should show off as much of the body as it covers up.”
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
