Oscar Gold Rush

I’ve got a love/hate relationship with the Oscars. I don’t really care about them, but I don’t not care about them either. The annual backslapping parade of self-righteousness and self-aggrandisement makes for knuckle-gnawing viewing, but in recent years my bleary eyed regret at staying up all night to watch them has been offset by the occasional moments of genuine surprise, organisational chaos and slap-happy violence.

Shortly after the announcement of this year’s nominees on Tuesday I was on BBC Radio Scotland’s The Afternoon Show with the incomparable Janice Forsyth to chat about all this and provide some instant analysis. It was a fun show (you can listen again on BBC Sounds — I’m on about 70 minutes in) but the thing I found most heartening about this year’s contenders was the sudden emergence of Everything Everywhere All at Once as the film to beat. Unlike the much fancied All Quiet on the Western Front or The Fabelmans or the Banshees of Inisherin — all of which stacked up nods aplenty — the vowel-tastic EEAAO (as it’s now being abbreviated) is one of those rare Oscar frontrunners that wasn’t released as an Oscar film.

A wild inter-dimensional martial arts fantasy that took the suddenly in vogue concept of the multiverse and used it to drag Michelle Yeoh through infinite versions of her character’s life on a quest to fix her dysfunctional family, the break-out film of 2022 was a genuine box-office phenomenon that came out in the US last spring and in the UK in the summer. Neither are prime spots for movies with awards on their minds and I’ll wager that, until recently, A24 — the hipster US indie that financed and distributed it — probably didn’t imagine the film would have the awards momentum it does, certainly not when they also have the more obviously awards-friendly The Whale on their slate.

But certain films are undeniable and for this reason the trajectory of Everything Everywhere All At Once reminds me of Boyhood’s journey to the Oscars in 2015. I spoke to Richard Linklater about it at the time and you can read the whole article here. He was typically philosophical about the hoopla, but honest too about how rigged the system was. Eight years on — and after the disruptions of the pandemic — it’s a little depressing that the awards recognition for Everything Everywhere All At Once remains an anomaly. The Oscars should be a reflection of the whole year’s films, not just those crammed into its final few months for the benefit of memory deficient voters.