Oscars 2023: What winners Everything Everywhere All at Once, All Quiet on the Western Front mean for the future of film

Michelle Yeoh, winner of the Best Actress in a Leading Role award for "Everything Everywhere All At Once," and Brendan Fraser, winner of the Best Actor in a Leading Role award for "The Whale". Photo / Getty Images

Yes, Everything Everywhere All at Once swept the board at last night’s Academy Awards. Seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and all three of the acting ones for which it was nominated, was an even better tally than many of us predicted.

But while Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s madcap multiverse comedy now (however improbably) joins the ranks of such fellow seven-time winners as Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Schindler’s List, the Academy’s 9500 or so voters still managed to give viewers the impression that the wealth was being generously spread.

In All Quiet on the Western Front – Edward Berger’s sobering and balefully handsome First World War epic, pleasingly at odds in themes and tone with Everything Everywhere’s bubbling zaniness – Netflix had the most successful contender in their short and often fraught Oscar-campaigning history.

Berger’s film’s wins in four categories – Best International Feature, Best Original Score, Best Production Design and Best Cinematography – put it ahead of all of the streaming platform’s previous heavyweight contenders, including Roma, The Irishman, Marriage Story and The Power of the Dog.

There was a little love, too, for Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water, which respectively took Best Sound and Best Visual Effects. If the two highest grossing films of last year had left the ceremony with nothing, that would have been a deathly black mark against an institution which hasn’t been known, of late, for reflecting popular tastes.

It was a pity they couldn’t find a slot in which to recognise Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis too – the most successful non-sequel nominated by far, it made almost £240 million (NZ$470 million) worldwide – but with Ruth E Carter taking Best Costume Design for her work in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, even Marvel didn’t leave empty handed.

Brendan Fraser in The Whale. Photo / Supplied

And with Brendan Fraser’s win for Best Actor for his work in The Whale, one of the most popular comeback narratives of recent years reached its long-anticipated (though by no means assured) happy ending.

Darren Aronofsky’s Biblically inflected chamber piece may have itself been critically divisive, but it too was a hit as these sorts of films go, having taken £30 million (NZ$59 million) worldwide after being made for less than a tenth of that amount. And it went away with two Oscars: as well as Best Actor, it took Best Makeup and Hairstyling, one assumes largely for Fraser’s impressively plausible prosthetic flab.

Conversely, it was the films which seemed most aligned with the Academy’s recent tastes that overwhelmingly missed out.

Todd Field’s critically acclaimed psychological drama Tár didn’t make good on any of its six nominations, not even Cate Blanchett in Best Actress. The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s memoir piece, went zero for seven; The Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh’s dark Irish tragicomedy, zero for nine.

Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Photo / supplied

Does this mean that after a decade of niche picks over crowd-pleasing ones, the Academy’s tastes have taken a turn for the populist?

Well, perhaps – though while voters will have surely been especially conscious this year of rewarding the films that drove their audience back into cinemas, the strong showing for All Quiet on the Western Front, a streaming release with a minimal big-screen rollout, proves the return of the theatrical experience wasn’t the only thing on their minds.

Whether it’s a shift or just a phase, however, it’s left us with a suite of Oscar winners that doesn’t make you wish the whole ceremony had unfolded in an entirely different branch of the multiverse.