At Monday night’s Gotham Awards, Everything Everywhere All at Once picked up the best feature prize, beating out fellow nominees like Tár and Aftersun. It was the film’s second win of the night, after actor Ke Huy Quan landed the statuette for outstanding supporting performance in the newly gender-neutral category, besting contenders like Mark Rylance (Bones and All) and Gabrielle Union (The Inspection).
“This time last year, all I was hoping for was a job,” a visibly moved Quan said in his acceptance speech. The actor, a former child star who stopped acting for decades before returning for this film, gave a special shoutout to the film’s co-directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert: “They gave me a second chance.” Everything Everywhere is the Daniels’ genre-busting tale about a Chinese immigrant mother (played by Michelle Yeoh, another awards season frontrunner) getting thrust into the multiverse. (Also: taxes and bagels and stuff.) Quan plays the earnest dad, Waymond Wang.
The Gotham Awards ceremony—presented with the help of lead sponsor Vanity Fair—is the unofficial kickoff to awards season, unfolding at Cipriani Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. The star-studded event saw Lupita Nyong’o, Julianne Moore, Danai Gurira, Baz Luhrmann, Jennifer Lawrence, Bowen Yang, Kathryn Bigelow and more in attendance to give and receive awards. Special tribute awards were given to Michelle Williams, Adam Sandler, Gina Prince-Bythewood, the family of Sidney Poitier, the cast of Fire Island and more.
Williams, an Oscar contender thanks to her turn in Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical family drama The Fabelmans, was presented her award by costar Paul Dano. “A character actor and a movie star—the ultimate compliment in my book,” Dano said of Williams. Spielberg was also supposed to be in attendance to fete Williams, but skipped the ceremony after testing positive for COVID. Nevertheless, Williams delivered the first of perhaps many speeches she’ll give over the course of this awards season.
“I shouldn’t even be out of the house, I just had a baby!” Williams quipped after receiving a standing ovation. She dedicated her award to Mary Beth Peil, the Tony-nominated actor and opera singer who played Williams’s character’s mother in Dawson’s Creek. Peil, Williams says, was “the first artist that I’d ever met in my life.”
One of the night’s most thrilling surprises came in the outstanding lead performance category, which went to Danielle Deadwyler in Till. In the gender-neutral category, Deadwyler beat out Brendan Fraser and Cate Blanchett, two perceived awards heavyweights of the season. The actor was not in attendance at the Gothams, but Till director Chinonye Chukwu accepted the award on her behalf, reading a rousing speech Deadwyler had prepared beforehand, which quoted Audre Lorde and paid homage to the woman at the center of the film. “Thank you to the mother to us all, Mamie Till-Mobley,” Chukwu read.
On the other end of the spectrum, Adam Sandler—on the circuit for his basketball drama Hustle—burned the house down with the most aggressively silly speech of the night, accepting a tribute award presented by the Safdie brothers. Sandler, using a you-just-had-to-be-there style Southern accent and pretending the speech had been written by his teenage daughters, asked the important questions: “Where is Timothée Chalamet and how can we legally squeeze that fine little Jewish ass of his?” Sandler also poked fun at himself, joking that since he was out of the house for the night, his daughters were now free to “laugh out loud at Ben Stiller movies.”
In the competitive categories, writer-director Charlotte Wells won the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director award for Aftersun, the stirring father-daughter drama starring Paul Mescal, while All that Breathes won best documentary. The French drama Happening was awarded best international feature, while best screenplay went to Todd Field for Tár, who delivered a heady speech deconstructing the “cartoonish” idea of trying to establish what’s “best” among various creative endeavors. Field later returned to the stage to with James Gray (Armageddon Time) to present a special award to Focus Features chairman Peter Kujawski and vice chairman Jason Cassidy. Once at the podium, Gray balked at how long Field’s prepared speech was. “Pour some coffee,” he instructed the audience.
While the awards, selected by small batch committees who differ from category to category, don’t generally correlate with which way the wind will blow at the upcoming Oscars, the Gotham Awards are a festive first look at budding awards narratives and a chance for eclectic surprise wins that shake up the status quo. This year, that means handing over the top prize to a fresh offering like Everything Everywhere, a film whose journey toward the Oscars has officially begun.
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