Oscar: once again… the best didn’t win

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Did the best win? Definitely not, at least in our opinion. It was widely predictable, given all the successes achieved in recent weeks and beyond, that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert could win the most important Oscar – the one for best film – but the decision still leaves us once decidedly perplexing, especially given the triumph of the film in six other categories: best director, best editing, best original screenplay, best actress (Michelle Yeoh), best actress (Jamie Lee Curtis) and best supporting actor ( Ke Huy Quan).
Like last year with “The signs of the heart – Coda”, the Academy missed the opportunity to reward a cinematically wonderful work: twelve months ago we were talking about “Licorice Pizza”, “West Side Story” or “Drive My Car ”, this year however our preferences undoubtedly went to the memorable “The Fabelmans”, but without forgetting the narrative power of “The spirits of the island” or the artistic one of “Avatar – La via dell’acqua”.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once”

Released in American theaters during the spring of last year, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” immediately became an incredible case of success at home, both for the too unanimously excellent reviews received, and for the very rich box office: only in the United States has exceeded 70 million dollars in gross, far exceeding expectations. The plot of the film centers on Evelyn Wang, a woman who runs a laundromat, has a teenage daughter who no longer understands, a very and a sunset boulevard wedding. A routine tax audit unexpectedly becomes the door through which the woman is drawn into an incredible adventure in the multiverse, where she will be called upon to save the fate of all her inhabitants.

Surely the “Daniels” film, as the two directors are called in a friendly way, is an original product, full of oddities of various kinds, capable of entertaining and also demonstrating a certain brilliance in dealing with a complex theme such as that of the multiverse (which can be summarized with the concept of parallel dimensions) in a logic closer to independent cinema than to the big Marvel blockbusters, with which we usually associate this topic. Despite the obvious efforts, however, the film too often slips into narrative mechanisms that are no longer so original and in any case excessive in their repetition (the almost two and a half hours of duration do not help and stun more than necessary). Alternating good moments with other really verbose, forgettable and unnecessarily emphatic beyond belief, the film works halfway, striking more for the ideas than for the actual rendering.

Geopolitics and politically correct

Once again the Oscars have thus opted for a film full of “fashionable” and forcibly inclusive themes: the Academy’s attention in this sense is always very high, with awards as usual politically correct, even at a geopolitical level (the two prizes went to Indian cinema, for the best original song and for the best documentary short, they should also be read like this).

We are perhaps in the minority to support it, but it doesn’t matter: “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is an enjoyable divertissement or little more.