Oscars 2023: Can Anything Beat Everything, Everywhere All At Once?

It’s rough being the frontrunner, especially when there is a whole month to go before voting even starts. This time last year, at least for me, I was in “I don’t know” territory, which I’ve been for a while now since the Oscars really started to change, around 2016.

Last year I did not think The Power of the Dog was going to win. I thought the movie was not accessible enough and that it was Netflix and that the Academy was not ready to give its Best Picture award to a streaming platform. But as it turned out, they were — if you made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. The less you knew about traditional Oscar history, the easier it was to imagine CODA winning. Oddly enough, the more you knew about recent Oscar history, the faster your mind could accept the new reality. Not only was CODA a sweet movie that made people feel good, it was also a movie — in the minds of today’s voters — that did some good in the world, by representing the deaf community.

Gold Derby has almost everyone on board with Everything, Everywhere All at Once. There are a few resisters. One person has The Fabelmans, another has Banshees. One has Top Gun: Maverick. But from a stats perspective, only one movie CAN win and that’s EEAAO. So why fight it?

Still, the question remains: CAN any other film build a strong enough consensus to win? We have to wait for the major guilds, but if I was going to make the case for the alternatives, these are the cases I would make:

(Keep in mind that around this time last year, I probably wouldn’t have even considered CODA as one of the movies that could win. When the momentum shifts in a different direction, it usually happens because a movie wins the last few all-important guild awards)

The Fabelmans

Steven Spielberg is kind of a unicorn in Hollywood. He has given us the magic of the movies, comfort, and escapism. Some (most) of his efforts were successes. A few were failures. Spielberg is the guy who made Jurassic Park, the highest grossing film of 1993, the same year he made Schindler’s List, which won the Best Picture Oscar.

How did this middle-class suburban kid become the guy who made those kinds of movies a whole genre unto themselves and do it consistently for four decades? The Fabelmans attempts to answer to this question. Though he gets his artist’s eye from his mother and his discipline from his father, none of that fully explains how Spielberg became one of the greatest directors in American history. Not until the final scene.

In the same way Rosebud is set aflame at the end of Citizen Kane as a simple answer to a seemingly complex mystery, Spielberg delivers us his Rosebud: the horizon line. Irascible old John Ford tells him that the horizon line has to either be high or low. Anything else lacks adequate symbolic perspective.

And as his story comes to a close — after everything he’s just told us about who he is, where he came from, the people who shaped his life — he breaks the fourth wall and winks back at us. “You see,” he seems to say, “it wasn’t all that complicated. It’s just a matter of where you put the camera.”

Speaking for myself, I don’t need much more than that to hand the prize to the maestro. What wouldn’t I hand him at this point? He helped shape my whole childhood and did nothing but give back to us for over forty years, taking us through our past, our present, our future. Take all of the awards, Mr. Spielberg. You have earned them.

Top Gun: Maverick

The second possible alternative is what is actually deemed to be the Film of the Year by almost anyone’s measure, except those of us who exist inside this insulated, isolated bubble we call the Oscar race. It’s fast becoming fashion week or the Tony Awards, with little relevance to anyone else. But why wouldn’t Top Gun: Maverick actually be worthy as the year’s winner? Well, some will say because it doesn’t have a Best Actor nomination and it wasn’t nominated for BAFTA. Okay, fine. But those seem like stupid reasons, don’t they? They’re just another way of saying these voters aren’t fully on board. I’m still dumb enough to think Best Picture of the Year should really mean that. I’ll never get over this:

Top Gun: Maverick is the kind of movie that 20 years ago probably wouldn’t have even been nominated, no matter how good it is. But it is also like Jaws was in 1975. It’s THAT movie. It’s the movie that re-awakened people bring them back to movies in theaters. The Oscars have never quite been able to make that leap from artsy movies or small character dramas to action movies or genre movies. But why not? If the industry is very nearly a grease stain where a once mighty empire once stood, what is so bad about rocking out with your cock out? Just once? Come on, people, what’s it gonna take?

Okay, kidding aside, I actually love this movie. Can you tell? I’m not surprised it won at the AARP’s Movies for Grownups awards because that’s just what it is. It’s a movie for people who remember MOVIES. I saw Jaws over 40 times in the movie theater and I probably would have seen Top Gun: Maverick that many times too. It’s just a pleasurable experience. They could do worse than this movie representing 2023.

The Banshees of Inisherin

The Banshees of Inisherin is the film with all of the necessary stats to actually mount a challenge to Everything, Everywhere All at Once, because it’s actor-driven and the Academy is ruled by actors. If you believe actors are the best visual effect, or perhaps writing too, this is the movie that should win. It’s similar to Everything Everywhere in that it must hit exactly right to be fully appreciated. For me, it landed in just the right spot between sweet, sad, joyful, and dark. Martin McDonagh has spent his entire career contemplating human existence. Long enough to know that our worth must ultimately be measured by two things: 1) niceness, to each other and to animals, and 2) the art we create.

He makes the argument beautifully that without these essentials, we’re lost. Each of the two main characters represents two facets of the human experience. But one can’t really exist without the other. Take art away from the Brendan Gleeson character and he might as well chop off his fingers. Take niceness away from the Colin Farrell character and he’s lost the only redeeming trait he had. Each must sacrifice something to keep things harmonious. McDonagh is probably himself each of these two characters and struggles with both.

What really makes The Banshees of Inisherin so good, though, is simply the brilliance of the ensemble cast. Not a weak link in the bunch.

All Quiet on the Western Front

We’ve seen plenty of war movies recently in the Oscar race, both World War I and World War II, including Sam Mendes’ masterpiece, 1917. Yet someone Edward Berger has found another way to depict a war that comes off original. But what might drive the win this year, perhaps at BAFTA, maybe here, is similar to what might drive Top Gun — we’re gearing up for war. We’re actually fighting a proxy war right now in Ukraine. We’re not that far, probably, from another world war. If we do end up fighting a world war it will likely be more like WWI – which was ultimately a prelude to WWII. Our world is becoming more unstable as we speak.

But that wouldn’t be the thing that drive this film to victory. Rather, it would have to be appreciation for the pure mastery of the work: the directing, the editing, the acting, the score. It is as powerful a war movie as has ever been made. Someday, in looking back at these nominees, that film will tower over the competition.

TÁR

Todd Field’s film is, I think, maybe the most important of the ten nominees. That’s because it is lifting up the veneer of the status quo and revealing a daring truth about the circumstances we’re living through. It’s the first film so far to even go near the idea of “cancel culture,” at least in the modern era. There have been many great films about those eras of the past, of course. But people are so afraid now they dare not go there. It isn’t that Todd Field has made any kind of indictment of our current, regrettable moment, but he’s dancing at the edge of the volcano. This may not be a movie that many people are going to push to the top of their ballots. But all the same, it does have heft in this race in all the right places, led by Cate Blanchett’s extraordinary performance.

All of these films, save Top Gun: Maverick, are original screenplays. All will be competing in many of the same categories. Screenplay, Director, and Picture are all highly competitive this year. Unless, of course, it’s all over anyway and Everything Everywhere All at Once is just too inventive, too successful, and too much of a zeitgeist movie to deny. It has the most nominations, a $70 million domestic haul, nominations across all of the major guilds — how can it lose?

The rest of the films in the race don’t seem like they can win. Is there a CODA among them? Is Women Talking CODA? Can Austin Butler drive Elvis to a Best Picture win? Can Avatar come back and finally win? Doubtful. The year’s Oscar race is going to tell a story. It is going to decide the future of the Oscars. It will either make them bigger or make them smaller. It will either prove that they belong on network television or that they’re edging even closer to being a niche market.

It will decide if the Academy should stick with 10 or go back to five nominees. Maybe settle in the middle, at six.

Whatever wins will likely win either Director or Screenplay but likely not both. Maybe both. Maybe neither.

Whatever happens, it is going to come down to the big guilds and the consensus that builds like a gathering storm out of them.

What do you think?