Picture the scene: it is the Oscars in 2027, and in the running for best picture are several movies that made you feel as though your brain was plucked from your skull and dunked luxuriously in liquid LSD. The assembled glitterati have made their way to the Dolby theatre in Los Angeles, but things are not as they used to be. Instead of worthy, glacially paced films about the history of cinema, the horrors of war, famous figures from the golden age of rock’n’roll or people from Ireland who spend a lot of time in the pub, Hollywood is celebrating a new generation of head-spinning, logic-refracting, universe-leaping, cine-literate science-fiction masterpieces.
This is only one of many possible futures. But if Everything Everywhere All at Once carries all before it on Sunday, it’s a future that just might morph into reality.
After all, according to Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s absurdist, kaleidoscopic sci-fi comedy, there are universes in which everyone has hot dogs for fingers and others in which some of us are simply rocks with eyes. So why not one in which a far-out, kung-fu-kicking, husband-and-wife pair of laundromat owners battle across the multiverse while referencing the movies of Wong Kar-wai and Stanley Kubrick, tackling the underrepresentation of Asian Americans in Hollywood and giving us all a glimpse into the endless pathos of potential lives not lived?
Incredibly, it’s starting to look as if the first piece in the puzzle is moving into position. According to the bookmakers, as we approach the weekend of the Oscars, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the overwhelming favourite to take the best picture award, while Kwan and Scheinert are looking good for best direction. Michelle Yeoh is very likely to walk off with the best actress gong for her role as saviour of the multiverse Evelyn Quan Wang, while if Ke Huy Quan doesn’t take home best supporting actor for his turn as mild-mannered Waymond Wang and his more charismatic alternate-universe counterparts, it will be the greatest Oscars shock since all that stuff last year with Will Smith.
All in all, the film is nominated for 11 awards and has a good chance of carrying off at least six of them. But what if this is just a freak occurrence and next year we return to a reality in which fusty period romances, staid biopics and the occasional international arthouse drama are once again the order of the day?
One of the problems with the idea that the success of Everything Everywhere All at Once could set an Oscars precedent is that it is a movie that’s going to be almost impossible to mimic. Unless Marvel somehow manages to incorporate the Wangs into phase six of its never-ending superhero saga – and come on, the idea of Doctor Strange taking on the evil, universe-hopping Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu) is surely more than a little enticing – we are probably not going to see its like again. It’s a synapse-shifting, hyper-kinetic, genre-defying cinematic monolith for the ADHD generation, and anyone who tries to repeat the trick is going to struggle.
But if Everything Everywhere All at Once does sweep the board on Sunday, at least there would be a better chance that equally weird concoctions from the genre region of the multiverse – films such as Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Duncan Jones’s Source Code or Christopher Nolan’s Inception (and yes, I’m aware the last of those won a handful of gongs in technical categories) – would be looked on more favourably going forwards.
That’s a reality many of us would be willing to live in – provided it doesn’t also come with the prospect of having 10 delicious sausage fingers just aching to be slathered in ketchup and munched down with pickles and a tasty brioche roll.
