Ke Huy Quan was celebrated by his Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom costar Harrison Ford when Everything Everywhere All At Once won movie of the year at the Oscars 2023.
At the 95th annual Academy Awards on Sunday, theDaniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert-directed film was awarded Best Picture to close out the ceremony. The other nine nominees were: All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, Triangle of Sadness and Women Talking.
Ford presented the cast and directors with the award and embraced Quan when he went onstage. An excited Quan jumped up and down before appearing to happily give Ford a kiss on the cheek.
Accepting the award, film producer Jonathan Wang praised the cast behind him.
"This feels incredible. There is no movie without our brilliant and big-hearted cast and crew. But not just these beautiful souls here. Also up there, and in Little Tokyo, we see you. So this award is ours."
Becoming speechless, he confessed, "It's intimidating speaking up here, let me tell you that. I never thought I would get to say this so I say it with one voice with all these people: Thank you to the Academy."
He thanked production company A24 and said, "You saw our weirdness and supported us for a year theatrically, that's incredible. Thank you."
Praising his "brilliant and beautiful wife Anni", he joked, "If all this shiny stuff and tuxedos goes away I would just love to do laundry and taxes with you for the rest of my life."
He went on the dedicate the award to his father, who "died young."
"He's so proud of me, not because of this but because we made this movie with what he taught me to do, which is no person is more important than profits," he said through tears. "And no one is more important than anyone else. And these weirdos right here supported me in doing that."
He told the directors, a.k.a. The Daniels, "I don't know what to say. I love you guys. You just won Best Picture."
Kwan briefly thanked his peers in the room, adding, "I think one of the things I realized growing up is one of the best things we can do for each other is sheltering each other from the chaos of this crazy world we live in."
The award marked the seventh of the evening for the film, who also won Actor in a Supporting Role, Actress in a Supporting Role, Original Screenplay, Film Editing, Directing and Actress in a Leading Role.
Everything Everywhere All at Once was the most-nominated film of the year with 11 total nods.
The wild sci-fi film is about an immigrant woman named Evelyn Wang (Yeoh), struggling to keep her family afloat while running a laundromat, who is tasked with saving the world — jumping between alternate realities and meeting friends and foes along the way. The indie film went on to become distribution company A24's highest-grossing release after it hit theaters last March.
It has surpassed other top money-makers from the production company like Uncut Gems (2019), which made $50 million domestically, and 2018's Hereditary, which made over $80 million worldwide.
Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, known professionally as the Daniels, recently spoke to Vulture about Everything Everywhere — and Kwan admitted, "This Oscars stuff is horrifying to me."
Scheinert recalled that while making the film, "We genuinely told people this movie was quantity over quality. To take them out of the mind set of a lot of filmmaking, of movie directors who are going to scream if they don't have four options for a sofa in a scene. This isn't that kind of movie. If you get us a sofa, we'll roll with it, man."
About their goals with the project, Kwan explained, "As storytellers, so much of our job is to make the illegible legible. We're taking all the information and noise of the world that's constantly flooded into our receptors and trying to create narratives that sum it all up. That's why we tried to make EEAAO, because we were so overwhelmed. In some ways, one of the problems with EEAAO is we tried too hard to compress it all down to something."
While promoting the film in 2022, Curtis said on The Talk, "I think there's a touching story at the heart of everything. And in the best of these sort of sci-fi multiverse movies, if they don't touch you, the audience leaves sort of inured."
"This is a movie that actually makes you feel tremendous heart," she added.
