Everything Everywhere All at Once, a genre-bending film from the independent studio A24, is leading the Oscars race with 11 nominations.
(Bloomberg) — Everything Everywhere All at Once, a genre-bending film from the independent studio A24, is leading the Oscars race with 11 nominations.
The movie is up for best picture and best director for duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, among other categories, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences said Tuesday. Actress Michelle Yeoh, who won a Golden Globe earlier this month for her performance in the film, received her first Oscar nomination for best actress.
The Searchlight Pictures dark comedy, The Banshees of Inisherin, and Steven Spielberg’s coming-of-age drama The Fabelmans, distributed through a unit of Comcast Corp.’s Universal, were also among the most nominated. Fabelmans won the Golden Globe award for best drama picture earlier in January.
The Oscars are the most prestigious in the film industry, but only occasionally track the movies that won big at the box office. This year may be different. Walt Disney Co.’s Avatar: The Way of Water, which has generated more than $2 billion in global ticket sales since its release in December, was nominated in four categories. Paramount Global’s Top Gun: Maverick, which generated about $1.5 billion in ticket sales, was nominated in six categories; both movies will contend for best picture.
Overall the ten best picture nominees have so far grossed $1.57 billion domestically, the largest figure ever at the time of nomination, according to data from Comscore Inc.
The financial success is also a sign of a return to theatrical releases. Early in the pandemic, the Academy temporarily lifted a rule that said movies must premiere in cinemas — and not on streaming services — to be eligible for awards. Streaming services thrived in that era, with Apple Inc. taking home its first best picture prize for Coda last year.
Those services didn’t fare as well with this year’s nominations. Netflix Inc. is up for several awards, including best picture for All Quiet on the Western Front, but Amazon.com Inc. and Apple only got a handful of nominations combined.
Disney and Universal each had two movies recognized in the best picture category. In addition to Avatar, Banshees of Inisherin and Fabelmans, a unit of Universal was nominated for Tar.
If Everything Everywhere All at Once is chosen as the top film of the year, it would be A24’s second victory in that category since Moonlight, which won at the 2017 ceremony, a remarkable feat for a studio that was founded just over a decade ago.
A24 received well over a dozen Oscar nominations this year for films including the critically acclaimed The Whale. In 2022 it raised $225 million to fund future projects.
The 2023 ceremony will also seek to build on a ratings bump from last year, after about a decade of declining viewership. The audience grew even before the viral moment when actor Will Smith slapped host Chris Rock after Rock made a joke about the appearance of Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
This year’s awards program airs March 12 on ABC.
–With assistance from Christopher Palmeri.
(Updates with Spielberg’s Golden Globe win in third paragraph. An earlier version of this story was corrected to reflect Apple’s awards count.)
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