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- February 19, 2023
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This awards season has been very long, and fairly consistent, but Saturday night still delivered a major turning point: The industry actually gave out a major award. We’d heard from the journalists who vote on the Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globes, but so far the major industry awards—BAFTA, SAG, the Oscars— had only announce their nominees. But on Saturday the Directors Guild of America gave us our first palpable sense of who Hollywood is getting behind for best picture of the year. The answer, after a long and winding three-hour-plus ceremony: Everything Everywhere All at Once.
It’s not a huge shock, following the A24 miracle movie’s utter dominance at the Critics Choice Awards and its huge Oscar nomination tally of 11. But for a genre-mashing, boundary-defying, hot-dog-finger-wielding movie such as this, going all the way over the likes of Steven Spielberg and Top Gun: Maverick with a bunch of directors still speaks volumes. Early in the ceremony, host Judd Apatow perhaps set the tone by remarking that James Cameron wasn’t nominated by his peers for his technically masterful Avatar sequel, while the two men behind the film with “the dildo fight” were. Welcome to 2023.
Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert were in attendance, as were their fellow nominees Spielberg, Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski, and Tár’s Todd Field. (Martin McDonagh, the fifth nominee, was absent.) Bleeding into Sunday’s BAFTA Awards, the event ended just in time for Kwan, Scheinert, and Field to hop on a plane to London, where they’re also competing, while Spielberg is flying out to Berlin where he’s being lauded with an Honorary Golden Bear. Yes, it is that time of year. But each got their moment first, as the DGA ceremony gives every nominee his own presentation. Highlights included Paul Thomas Anderson describing “drooling” over Tár and Jerry Bruckheimer very earnestly commending Kosinski, the director who too rarely gets credit for Maverick’s artistic achievements.
And then there’s Spielberg, who loomed over the night. This may be the end of the road for his Oscar campaign, despite The Fabelmans’ auspicious start in Toronto last fall. The film simply hasn’t connected on an industry level in the way his competition seems to have; remember, he’s not even a BAFTA nominee. It’s a strange dynamic when virtually everyone inside the DGA Ceremony at the Beverly Hilton, from the Daniels and Field to presenters like Anderson and Denis Villeneuve, all but worship at the legendary Spielberg’s feet from the stage, even as the voters prepare to reward someone different. The dynamic was eerily similar to last year, when Spielberg was nominated for West Side Story and lost to Jane Campion.
The DGA is typically a safer voting body than the Academy—going with 1917 over Parasite, say—which makes Everything Everywhere’s triumph here all the more notable. You might be tempted to point to Power of the Dog’s similar combo at this point in the game—DGA and Critics’ Choice wins, Oscar noms leader—and plead caution for calling this thing over. Of course, nothing is sure yet. But unlike the case of Power, Everything Everywhere is a SAG ensemble front-runner too; that mix of acting- and directing-branch support is rare and potent. And anyway, in the last 21 years, 20 DGA winners for best film have gone on to win the Oscar for best picture and/or director. Something big is almost certainly happening for this movie.
So when Kwan and Scheinert hit the stage, you can understand why the latter wrapped up his speech by saying, “Holy shit. This is crazy.” This was the moment the industry affirmed this little-film-that-could was the one to beat. The BAFTAs have a chance to lift the likes of Banshees and Tár, to puncture that scrappy A24 momentum; the producers’ guild weighs in next week, where Maverick faces its own last stand. But right now, it’s everything everywhere for Everything Everywhere. No sign, still, of that changing.
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