The march toward Oscar gold continues for Everything Everywhere All at Once. The beloved A24 film won the top ensemble award from the Screen Actors Guild, an increasingly crucial bellwether in the race for best picture. Acting as a true ensemble, the cast took turns speaking into the microphone, reserving a special tribute to 94-year-old star James Hong, who as Michelle Yeoh put it, “has been supporting ensembles longer than the rest of us have been alive.” He earned his SAG card 70 years ago, as he said, for a movie with Clark Gable. How can you get a better awards show story than that?
The result isn’t too surprising given that Everything Everywhere led the field with five SAG nominations, tying with Martin McDonagh’s Irish black comedy The Banshees of Inisherin, its chief competition on Sunday night. But Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s genre-bending indie hit came into the night a front-runner in several categories and cleaned up in three even before ensemble: best supporting actor winner Ke Huy Quan, best actress winner Michelle Yeoh, and best supporting actress winner Jamie Lee Curtis, who was nominated alongside co-star Stephanie Hsu. All three of their ebullient speeches were vivid proof of how united this cast has been all awards season.
Along with Banshees, Everything Everywhere competed for SAG’s ensemble prize opposite fellow best-picture nominees The Fabelmans and Women Talking, both of which went home empty-handed with the guild, as well as the star-studded Babylon, which the Academy only nominated below the line in categories like production design and original score. With several major guild wins as well as a dominant showing at the Critics Choice Awards last month, Everything Everywhere remains in pole position for the top Oscar. With the field still tightly contested, all eyes will be on this incoming final week of campaigning. Voting on the Oscar winners begins Thursday and runs through the following Tuesday.
Last year, SAG provided our first indication at a shifting Oscar race by handing its big award to CODA, tilting the momentum away from then front-runner The Power of the Dog. CODA went on to win with the Producers Guild, as Everything Everywhere did last night, and then the top Oscar. Other instances of SAG leading the way in Academy forecasting include when underdogs like Spotlight and Parasite went all the way with the actors guild, despite other precursors like BAFTA passing them over. (This year, BAFTA chose All Quiet on the Western Front for best film; the Netflix war drama was not nominated by either SAG or PGA, and thus remains a big question mark headed into next month’s Oscars.)
Notably, while A24 previously won a best-picture Oscar with Moonlight, this is the studio’s first SAG ensemble victory. Everything Everywhere’s triumph also marks the first time a non-streaming film won this top award since Parasite’s upset in 2020; the previous two winners were Apple’s CODA and Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago 7.
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