Everything Everywhere All At Once first SXSW film to earn best pic nom

Everything Everywhere All At Once announced itself this morning as a serious Oscar threat with 11 nominations, topping off with Best Picture. That includes performing noms for Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis, Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan. The film also drew noms for Original Screenplay, Costume, Original Score, Original Song, Film Editing and Directing for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.

The overachieving journey of the film is almost as absurd as its parallel universe storyline. It goes far beyond being the rare film to premiere at the SXSW festival and find its way to Oscar almost a year later. The film began with AGBO partners Joe and Anthony Russo seeing Kwan & Scheinert’s Swiss Army Man, the film that starred Paul Dano as a man stranded on a desert island who befriends a dead body — played with flatulent gusto by Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe — as they join forces to return to civilization. The AGBO partners gave a blind deal to “The Daniels,” as the filmmaking team is known, to do whatever they wanted.

They fashioned Everything Everywhere All at Once as a vehicle for Jackie Chan. When the action star ultimately passed, they turned to Michelle Yeoh to play the Chinese-American immigrant laundromat owner under IRS audit who must connect with parallel universe versions of herself to fight a powerful being bent on destroying the multiverse. This turns loose the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon star’s action chops.

Quan — best known for playing Indiana Jones’ sidekick as a child actor — Hsu and hip distributor A24 launched the film at SXSW early last March, and followed with a theatrical release shortly after. Despite the lingering limitations of the pandemic, the action- and fun-filled surreal adventure became that distributor’s first film to cross the $100 million gross mark worldwide.