Finally, finally, I can uncork this champagne. It’s been sitting on ice for decades.
Everything Everywhere All At Once won Best Picture Sunday night, and the Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Supporting Actor awards went to actors from the same movie. There’s a lot of noise online about how “woke” the movie is, how the critics reviled it because of its Asian cast, its gay characters, yadda yadda. Whatever. As a challenge to the prejudices that have ruled Hollywood for decades, it’s a landmark. What nobody seems to realize is that this is a breakthrough on another front, one almost as important as racial diversity.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is the very first science fiction picture in history to win a Best Picture Oscar. The very first.
Many folks will find that astonishing, given that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been handing out statues for 94 years. Surely, they say, a science fiction film must have won Best Picture somewhere along the line. What about Star Wars? What about Blade Runner, or Jurassic Park, or The Matrix, or Avatar? They were all blockbusters, a couple of them were critical hits, and all but one of them spawned an entire franchise. Yet not only are science fiction films not awarded Best Picture, they are rarely even nominated.
There will be some who point to Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and other fantasy movies which have won Best Picture. I won’t re-open the “what is science fiction” argument here, but state that Lord of the Rings is fantasy, plain and simple. It’s not science fiction. The bias against recognizably science fiction movies is so intense that even Guillermo del Toro, the director of Best Picture winner The Shape of Water, loudly denied that it was a science fiction movie; critics have called it a fantasy, an allegory, a fable, an homage — anything but science fiction.
Hollywood loves its lucrative genre movies, but it is apparently ashamed of them, too. It’s like a family where the richest member is a crack dealer: they love the money but they’re ashamed of its source. I’ve written elsewhere about why Oscar hates SF movies, with an extensive list of passed-over classics that lost out to lesser known but conventional films. It discusses Hollywood’s discomfort with its own audience, its insecurity, and its ambition to celebrate work it considers art, rather than lowbrow entertainment.
So what makes Everything Everywhere All At Once a winner? To be honest, I think it was because it didn’t look like a science fiction movie. Yes, it had Asian actors in it, but we’ve had wonderful Asian actors in movies before. I think the reason this movie won was because somehow the Academy missed the fact that it was a science fiction movie. There were no rocket ships, no ray-guns, no lightsabers. It was not a Western dressed up with CGI and space six-shooters. To the mind of many Academy voters, this meant that it could not be a “real” science fiction movie.
The multiverse was not a prop, it was essential to the story. The concept of the multiverse is essentially that there are myriad alternate universes, each of which branches off from minor or major decision trees. The idea is in line with modern science fiction, the kind you find on best seller lists today. But Hollywood has been stuck forever in the mindset that says real SF has bug-eyed monsters and lightsabers, concepts that were current in the Golden Age of science fiction, which is to say, before World War II. Since then we’ve had New Wave science fiction, Cyberpunk, soft SF, Afrofuturism, even steampunk. Science fiction, more than any other genre, is flexible enough to address social issues indirectly and effectively, from racism to sexism to fascism and other political third rails. This is not because it is “woke”, but because it is effective storytelling.
And this is why Everything Everywhere All At Once won Best Picture: not because of the multiverse concept it explored, but because the heart of its story is family. And family is universal. Everything Everywhere All At Once is about how, despite crossing multiple universes and outwitting bizarre versions of themselves, the members of this small and unremarkable family found love, security, and comfort with one another. In the end, the bedrock of their family is love, laundry and doing the taxes. Many of the classics of Western literature are about something this simple; Odysseus just wants to get home to his home and family, despite facing a host of monsters, sorceresses, and angry gods. So even if Everything Everywhere All At Once won despite being a science fiction picture, I’ll take the win. It’s a good movie on every level.
Today, I expect a host of Oscar commentators and movie critics will be tying themselves in knots to earnestly explain to us how Everything Everywhere All At Once is actually not a science fiction movie. It’s an allegory, or a fantasy, or whatever. I’m not buying it, and you shouldn’t either. Hollywood may, in fact, have awarded this movie Best Picture because it was dazzled by its fabulous cast, the outstanding acting, and the heartwarming story. The movie may have flown under the Academy’s radar and, like Jeff Goldblum’s character in Independence Day, snuck a stealth program into the mothership. If true, it still does not negate the fact that this is a win for science fiction as a genre.
Last night, in accepting his Best Actor statue at the Academy Awards–for an entirely different movie– Brendan Fraser said, “So this is what the multiverse looks like”. The audience didn’t seem to get the reference, but I did. He was saying that his win — like Everything Everywhere All At Once’s win— was so unlikely that he must have entered an alternate universe.
If so, I’m glad to be in it with him.