From ‘Game of Thrones’ to ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ is Hollywood finally over its genre-phobia?
I’m an elder millennial who was raised on “Star Trek,” “The X-Files,” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” so I grew up with the understanding that, despite pumping out a steady stream of sci-fi and fantasy, Hollywood insiders didn’t really respect genre fiction as much as they did real-world dramas. They were seldom nominated for top industry awards, and the few that did break through rarely won. A world in which “Everything Everywhere All at Once” could win Best Picture at the Oscars didn’t seem possible. Now that it has, can we say that Hollywood’s anti-genre bias is gone for good?
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“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is the first science-fiction film to win Best Picture, depending on how you classify “The Shape of Water,” which could be seen as more of a fairy tale/fantasy. One thing is for sure: including “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” only three sci-fi/fantasy films have ever won top honors from the motion picture academy. And when “Return of the King” did it, triumphant fantasy stories were still the exception and not the rule; it took an unprecedented trilogy released over three years to universal adoration and box office success to win Oscar voters’ respect.
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The TV academy has also been resistant to genre projects, though their hearts have thawed faster over the last 20 years. Since “Lost” became the first sci-fi show to win Best Drama Series in 2005, genre shows have been commonplace among the nominees, from “True Blood” to “Westworld” to “Stranger Things.” But the show that really busted down the doors was “Game of Thrones,” an epic fantasy full of magic and dragons that won Best Drama Series a record-tying four times and made history as the most awarded scripted narrative series of all time. Nowadays a show like “The Last of Us,” which is full of mushroom zombies, can matter-of-factly be considered a top awards contender.
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Film, though, has been a tougher nut to crack. The academy has made more and more idiosyncratic, forward-thinking choices like “Moonlight” and “Parasite” in recent years, but there’s still a old-fashioned traditionalism among voters that sometimes results in more conservative winners like “Green Book” and “CODA.” So for most of the season — right up until the Best Picture envelope opened, even — I wondered if “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was a bridge too far. The interdimensional comedy-drama that includes hot dog fingers, butt plugs, and dildos was so far out there that even five years ago it would have seemed almost impossible to imagine it being more than maybe a play for Best Original Screenplay.
And yet it won Best Picture. And it tied “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Network” for the most acting wins in history. It feels like the culmination of years of sci-fi films chipping away at that glass ceiling, including “Gravity,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” and “Dune,” which won awards hand-over-fist in recent years but fell short of the top prize. That doesn’t mean next year’s winner won’t be “Classy British Period Drama” or “Prestigious Literary Adaptation,” but it drastically expands the multi-verse of possibilities for what constitutes an “Oscar movie.” And that may be the best thing that came out of Oscar night.
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