Everything Everywhere All At Once just demolished the Independent Spirit Awards
The sci-fi comedy won for Best Performance, Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and more, dominating the film slate
Once upon a time, the Film Independent Spirit Awards occupied a very particular spot in the awards season timeline: Perched literally a day before the Oscars, they served as a gentle critical barometer for where the Big Show might be going, were it to let its more, y’know, creative impulses take the wheel. That hasn’t been the case for the last two years—the Spirit Awards got shunted to 8 days before the Oscars, instead—but they’re still the place where less conventional victories can be wrought. Like: Will sci-fi comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once sweep the Academy Awards next Sunday? It’s hard to say. But it sure as hell crushed it at the Spirit Awards today.
You can see the full list of winners right here, but rest assured that you’ll see a whole lot of bold being thrown around the words All, Everything, Once, Everywhere, and At. Stars Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, and Michelle Yeoh all won in their categories—for Breakthrough Star, Supporting Performance, and Lead Performance, respectively—while editor Paul Rogers and writer-directors Dan Kawn and Daniel Scheinert (“My boys,” as an emotional Yeoh put it) won Best Editing, Best Screenplay, and Best Director.
It was a dominant performance, honestly: Everything Everywhere won in every single category it was nominated for, finishing with a victory for Best Feature outright. (It also forced a lot of very austere actors to make jokes about hot-dog fingers, which was fun.) “This is too many,” Daniel Scheinert said, only half-joking, after the Best Feature win, as the directors and producers attempted some graciousness in the face of kicking everyone else’s asses.
Other big winners today, over in the Bagel-immune realm of TV: The Bear, which won for Best New Scripted Series and for Best Supporting Performance In A New Series. (Ayo Edibiri took that one home; she took a joking shot at co-star and co-nominee Ebon Moss-Bachrach during an emotional acceptance speech.) Quinta Brunson scored a win for acting in Abbott Elementary. And, most importantly, Nathan Fielder got to get up and give a speech for The Rehearsal, 90 percent of which was about the lunch served at the awards, because Nathan Fielder is perfect.