A win at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for the time-traveling adventure Everything, Everywhere, All at Once has solidified the film as a leading contender for the Academy Award for Best Picture, which will be handed out next month. Michelle Yeoh won best actress, Ke Huy Quan got best supporting actor, and Jamie Lee Curtis won best supporting actress for her work in the film about a Chinese-American family who suffer a tax audit and wind up confronting a universe-hopping supervillain. Yeoh, obviously moved to tears, collected her award while stifling a few choice words.
This isn’t for me alone,” she said. Saying, “This is for every young girl who looks like me,” Yeoh, who grew up in Malaysia, dedicated her Oscar win to all girls everywhere. “I appreciate you include me in this conversation.” Quan, who was a kid star in an Indiana Jones film in 1984 but had stopped acting for years, pointed out that he was the first Asian to receive the award. The Vietnamese-American actor explained, “There were very few opportunities when I moved away from performing.” The terrain has undergone a dramatic transformation. To everyone here who helped make these improvements possible, thank you. Yeoh gave her father character, portrayed by 94-year-old James Hong, the microphone when the actors walked the stage to accept the ensemble prize. Hong added that in the beginning of his career, producers would tell him that Asians were “not good enough” and then have white actors tape over their eyes to play “Asian” roles. His words, “But look at us today,” were met with thunderous applause. Together with its wins from the Directors Guild and the Producers Guild earlier this month, Everything, Everywhere is now a heavy favorite to take home an Oscar on March 12. As actors constitute the greatest bloc of Oscar voters, the films selected as winners by SAG, Hollywood’s acting organization, are keenly monitored.
Many award ceremonies, such as the Directors Guild and Producers Guild, have given Everything Everywhere their highest honors. More than $107 million has been made from the film’s ticket sales. For distributor A24, it’s their highest-grossing picture ever. Brendan Fraser, the lone performer from a film other than Everything Everywhere to win a film award on Sunday, received the SAG award for best male movie actor. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Fraser was one of Hollywood’s greatest stars thanks to films like The Mummy. He then went through a long dry spell until playing a reclusive, morbidly obese father in The Whale who tries to reconnect with his daughter.
