Oscars Review – Best Supporting Actress Controversy, Significance of Everything Everywhere’s Wins and More

Photo Courtesy: Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images

This year’s Oscars proved a triumph for the genre-bending Everything Everywhere All At Once, which capped off its amazing awards season run by taking home 7 awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Most controversially, the latter award went to Jamie Lee Curtis – undoubtedly a Hollywood legend, but was she the best in her category?

I’m of the view that Jamie Lee Curtis was not even the best supporting actress in Everything Everywhere – Stephanie Hsu’s mighty performance as Joy / Jobu Tupaki was my standout of the entire film. Her egregious snub not just by the Academy, but throughout the awards season, risks continuing the cycle of a lack of Asian representation and acknowledgement on the big screen. A lot of talk has been made about this topic in relation to EEAAO this awards season, and while the film’s success proves that maybe Hollywood is finally opening up to more unconventional films, Hsu only won one individual award all season – the Independent Spirit Award for Best Breakthrough – for what many consider to be a better performance than Curtis’s. 

This looks like a continuation of the cycle of exclusion that plagued Michelle Yeoh’s and Ke Huy Quan’s careers until this year. In many of the Oscar precursor awards, such as the Golden Globes and BAFTAs, Hsu was not even nominated. Furthermore, if the Academy were going to let EEAAO sweep their awards, then why award Curtis instead of Hsu? I will take solace in the fact that, if Hsu is putting on performances of this calibre this early in her career, then there will undoubtedly be future Oscar success for her down the line.

Curtis’ win over Hsu also showed that the Academy decided this was going to be a year of rewarding overdue legends rather than the best in the category – not only Everything Everywhere’s three wins, but Brendan Fraser’s win for Best Actor was also an award for a Hollywood veteran for his comeback role. However, if this was what the Academy were going for, then Angela Bassett surely would have been a better pick for the Best Supporting Actress award. Her stacked resumé and powerful performance in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever made her the first actor to receive an Oscar nomination for a performance in a Marvel film – yet this distinction may have proved to be her downfall. 

While Bassett had the momentum early in awards season, she lost out at the end, perhaps due to general Marvel franchise fatigue – Wakanda Forever was arguably only one of two quality films in Phase 4 (the other being Doctor Strange) and the Academy might not have been ready to reward the franchise in such a way yet. Either that, or the curse of Ariana DeBose – as soon as ‘Angela Bassett did the thing’, she proceeded to lose the majority of her future nominations.
All of this is not to downplay the significance of Everything Everywhere’s success. It became the most awarded film of all time even before the Oscars, a major feat considering it is an unconventional indie film with a majority-Asian cast. If all of its success hasn’t convinced you to watch the film then I am here to implore you to do so – preferably on the biggest screen possible (although it is available on Amazon Prime).