Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Best Picture Oscar is a triumph for weird cinema

polygon.com:

Everything Everywhere All At Once is the 2023 Oscars Best Picture winner, and it also netted six other awards, for Best Director, Original Screenplay, Film Editing, Actress, and Supporting Actor and Actress. For anyone who watched this year’s ceremony, where the audience went wild every time the film was mentioned, the Best Picture win stopped being a surprise about halfway through the show. But a year ago, no one could have watched Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s multiverse masterpiece and anticipated this kind of response or recognition — not from the notoriously stodgy Academy.

Everything Everywhere initially felt like a film designed to earn a small, passionate audience. At best, it seemed like it might become a well-kept cult-movie secret. It played like a bigger and brighter version of the Daniels’ first movie, Swiss Army Man— a movie beloved in certain circles, but too dark, eccentric, and subversive to command a mainstream or widespread audience. Certainly neither of their projects felt like Academy contenders.

But as word of mouth about the film grew, and it stayed in theaters week after week, the narrative began to change. There were so many reasons to see the film as a collective feel-good experience for cinema fans: Ke Huy Quan’s triumphant return to film; Michelle Yeoh landing a leading role worthy of her acting skills, as well as her martial-arts skills. Jamie Lee Curtis returning to comedy in a unique role. A majority Asian cast telling the kind of nuanced, emotional story they so rarely get to tell in American film. A story full of Easter eggs and in-jokes aimed directly at cinephiles. As the conversation around the movie got bigger and bigger, it started to take on scrappy-underdog overtones,