Oscars 2023 Live Updates: “Everything Everywhere” Wins Best Picture
Thank you for reading our live blog about the 2023 Oscars—we hope you enjoyed the evening as much as the cast of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” did. To stay apprised of the magazine’s ongoing film coverage—reviews, profiles, and more—sign up for our Movie Club newsletter.
No Room for Broadsides or Blasphemy in 2023
Like Mauritians going to a dodo festival in the spring of 1650, the good people of Hollywood flocked to the ninety-fifth Academy Awards on Sunday night. Any fears that motion pictures, in their current form, might be slouching toward extinction were artfully and cheerfully concealed. The only touch of the moribund was provided by Jonathan Majors, who arrived, in style, as a Victorian undertaker: frock coat, high collar, black tie. He must have left his top hat in the limo. Read more.
A Dutiful, Cautious Night
The Oscars ceremony was a pallid and watered-down entertainment, with little of what makes anybody care about movies. It felt like propaganda, and that—given the success of, say, Fox News—may indeed be a formula for a ratings hit. With Jimmy Kimmel as host and native advertising for Disney, Warner Bros., and the Academy Museum, this year’s broadcast was a razzle-dazzle commercial venture, a hectic sales pitch for Hollywood as a product and a value in and of itself. Read more.
The Oscars are over. The credits ended with quick snapshots of its most moving moments. Ke Huy Quan’s elation. Brendan Fraser’s surprise. These were the wholesome Oscars. To say that the ceremony went on without a hitch isn’t necessarily a compliment. How will the “E.E.A.A.O.” win age? I guess I’ll have to keep watching to find out.
The unlikely trajectory of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” has ended as foretold—with a Best Picture win. Our colleague Michael Schulman has called it a “unicorn.” How did a movie about a middle-aged working-class Asian immigrant who jumps within the multiverse—a movie that, as one of its two directors, Daniel Kwan, said, began with the sentence “Let’s put my mom in ‘The Matrix’ ”—end up sweeping many of the most important awards? The underdog narrative of it, I think, was irresistible, as was its momentum. There was a time no one would have got on the “E.E.A.A.O.” train, but, once they started filing in, they weren’t going to get off.
Best Picture: “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
The film with the most nominations—eleven—won seven prizes, including the biggest of the night.
Michelle Yeoh has won her first Oscar, and she’s made a really elegant appeal against ageism and against racism in her speech. But there are at least three performances Yeoh could have won for in the past. I wonder if the emphasis on representational politics that’s been attached to her win sometimes overshadows the craft itself.
So far, “Tár” has won no prizes. Chatting with my colleagues gave me some ideas about why that is. “The only people who have seen ‘Tár’ are in this office,” my editor Tyler Foggatt said, probably exaggerating only slightly, but hitting the mark nonetheless. (It should also be noted that the movie did open with our staffer Adam Gopnik interviewing Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár in a New Yorker Festival manqué setting.) It shouldn’t surprise us that “Tár” was shut out. It probably wasn’t meant to win any Oscars from the get-go.
Best Actress in a Leading Role: Michelle Yeoh
Michelle Yeoh has won the Academy Award for Best Actress. In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” she gave what Michael Schulman declared “the performance of her career”: “Yeoh not only is game for the movie’s tonal contortions but grounds them in recognizable human emotions: middle-aged disappointment, maternal frustration, and the thrill of opening your eyes to possibility.”
Brendan Fraser doesn’t go to the Golden Globes. He suffered mistreatment at the hands of the former president of the H.F.P.A. An actor who endured some of the worst hostility you can experience in the system has now just won an Oscar. His speech was so emotional. And, though his performance is the best aspect of “The Whale,” it isn’t a good film. It might be an actively harmful film. This is a complicated moment.
Best Actor in a Leading Role: Brendan Fraser, “The Whale”
Brendan Fraser’s Best Actor win is the culmination of a remarkable Hollywood comeback in a film that is much less popular than its lead. “Darren Aronofsky’s film is earnestly determined to present obesity as tragedy,” Anthony Lane wrote, “but its star manages to project a sweetness of nature through the layers of prosthetic fat.”
The Daniels, pretty unsurprisingly, won for Best Director. Daniel Scheinert dedicated the award to all the “mommies.” (When receiving Best Original Screenplay, he thanked his teachers.) Daniel Kwan thanked his immigrant parents and told his kids he would love them if they didn’t get an Oscar. “There is greatness in every single person,” he added. Could there have been a sweeter-natured, more millennial speech? It was the sort of thing that some people love and some people absolutely hate. I guess I am somewhere on the fence here, as I was about the movie. Heartwarming but a little heavy-handed with it.
Best Director: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert have won the Oscar for Best Director for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” minutes after winning Best Original Screenplay. The film appears to be living up to its role as what Michael Schulman termed the unicorn of this year’s Academy Awards.
Best Film Editing: Paul Rogers, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” evens the count with “All Quiet on the Western Front.” As the show closes in on the biggest honors of the night, each film has claimed four statuettes.
Best Original Song: “Naatu Naatu,” from “RRR”
It’s a tall order to beat numbers written or performed by Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and David Byrne, but M. M. Keeravaani and Chandrabose pulled it off, and made the audience laugh as they did so by citing the Carpenters as early inspirations.
Tom Cruise is not at the Oscars, but he is being invoked incessantly. Cruise as the indefatigable movie star, the actor who will not even deign to have an actor do his stunts. He’s the saint figure for this year’s Oscars! It’s a questionable tactic, to use films to draw people into the broadcast and then not really award them.
“Top Gun: Maverick” has won for Sound. I feel like the Academy had to give it at least one win tonight. The ceremony literally opened with a gag referencing the movie, followed by Kimmel citing it in his opening monologue as a film that “saved movies,” and it was probably the most popular film of the year.
Best Sound: “Top Gun: Maverick”
The Tom Cruise sequel gets on the board with its first win of the night—probably not something anyone would have predicted back in 1985, when the original “Top Gun” came out. The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane thought the sequel surpassed its predecessor.
Best Adapted Screenplay: Sarah Polley, “Women Talking”
Sarah Polley joins Ke Huy Quan as the second former child star to win an Oscar tonight, in her case for writing a film that she also directed. Rebecca Mead wrote in November about Polley’s path to becoming a feminist auteur.
Best Original Screenplay: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
“Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, young directors who go by the joint film credit Daniels, are known for reality-warped miniatures,” Raffi Khatchadourian wrote in 2017. Six years later, they’re both Oscar winners, giving “Everything Everywhere All at Once” its third win of the night.
