How Everything Everywhere All at Once Rewrote the Awards Playbook
The genre-bending multiverse drama from the Daniels won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, and changed what a mainstream awards contender can look like.
By The ITSMOVIES Desk · August 12, 2026 · 5 min read
Few films in recent memory have reshaped the awards landscape as dramatically as Everything Everywhere All at Once, the 2022 science-fiction comedy-drama written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the duo known as the Daniels.
The film follows Evelyn Wang, a Chinese-American laundromat owner played by Michelle Yeoh, who discovers she must connect with parallel versions of herself across the multiverse to confront a powerful threat. Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, Jamie Lee Curtis and James Hong round out a cast that turned an absurdist genre film into a deeply emotional story about family and regret.
At the 95th Academy Awards, the film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Yeoh, Best Supporting Actor for Quan and Best Supporting Actress for Curtis. Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress, and Quan's win capped one of the most celebrated comebacks in modern Hollywood.
Produced by independent studio A24 on a modest budget, the film became a cultural phenomenon and one of the studio's highest-grossing releases. Its success has since emboldened studios and awards voters alike to take genre filmmaking far more seriously as prestige work.
