Historic Wins and Heartfelt Comeback Stories Highlight the 95th Academy Awards

“Ladies, don’t let anyone tell you you are ever past your prime.”

So said a triumphant Michelle Yeoh, 60, as she accepted the Best Actress Oscar for the all-conquering and Best Picture–winning madcap feature Everything Everywhere All at Once, cooly cementing the notion of what is possible for women over 50 in Hollywood and beyond. As the first-ever Asian actress to secure the prize — and someone who tapped into her action star background to kick butt in the role — Yeoh would know.

 

Though fated to generate fewer screaming headlines than last year’s riotous Academy Awards — which were punctuated, of course, by “The Slap” — Sunday’s 95th Academy Awards were almost eerily orderly and streamlined, with most big wins aligning with advance predictions.

The ceremony also marked a number of commendable firsts and terrific (if long-overdue) scores for diversity. Everything Everywhere All at Once nabbed seven of its 11 marquee nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director, and a pair of sentimental favourites: Best Supporting Actor for Ke Huy Quan, 51, and Best Supporting Actress for Jamie Lee Curtis, 64 — first wins for both.

“My mom is 84 years old and she’s at home watching. ‘Mom I just won an Oscar,’” the highly favoured Quan said through tears, noting he had once lived in a refugee camp. Like Yeoh, he is the first Asian actor to win in his category. “I cannot believe this is happening to me. This, this is the American dream. Dreams are something you have to believe in. Please keep your dreams alive.”

It was a sensational comeback for the former child star best known for early 1980s hits Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies. After roles dried up, Quan left acting to go back to school and then work in stunt coordination and production jobs on movie sets for years before finally returning to acting. This role was his first since returning in front of the camera.

Curtis was also very moving at the microphone, some 45 years after her big-screen debut in 1978 horror hit Halloween. “I know it looks like am standing up here by myself, but I am hundreds,” she said before dutifully name-checking colleagues on the film, in her business orbit and her family.

“To all those people who have supported my genre movies over the years, we just won an Oscar together.” She also teared up speaking about her late parents — Janet Leigh, who received a nomination in the same category for Psycho in 1961, and Tony Curtis, who nabbed a Best Actor nod two years earlier for The Defiant Ones.

Everything Everywhere All at Once Best Director-winners Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert also seemed genuinely astonished by their win. “We want to dedicate this to all the mommies of the world,” Scheinert said, with Kwan adding, “We are all products of our context. There is greatness in every single person. You just have to find the right person to help that erupt.”

Canadians were very well represented at this year’s Oscars, with Brendan Fraser, 54, securing the odds-on favourite win for Best Actor in director Darren Aranofsky’s The Whale and completing his storied comeback tale that included multiple tearful film festival standing ovations for the role in the lead up to this moment. Fraser effusively thanked his colleagues and his sons. “I started in the business 30 years ago … thank you for this acknowledgment. I’m so grateful.” He is the first Canuck-reared star to win the award.

Then there was 44-year-old Toronto director Sarah Polley’s brilliant cinematic capture of novelist Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking, which netted Best Adapted Screenplay. Women Talking was also nominated for Best Picture, but what will doubtless be remembered was Polley’s opening missive to the Academy: “Thank you for not being offended by the words ‘women’ and ‘talking’ together.”

Toronto-born Daniel Roher’s Navalny — about Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, the nearly assassinated leader of the Russian opposition who still languishes in prison — scored Best Documentary Feature. It was appropriately awarded by musician and filmmaker Questlove, whose Summer of Soul won 2022’s Best Documentary Feature just as “The Slap” occurred.

And honourary Canadian, director and part-time Torontonian Guillermo del Toro, 58, won Best Animated Feature for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. The Mexican-born filmmaker thanked his wife and deceased parents during a brief and heartfelt speech accepting the evening’s first award.

Another Oscar win of note came courtesy of Ruth Carter winning Best Costume Design for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Carter, 62, was the first Black woman to win the Oscar for Best Costume Design in 2019 for Black Panther. This win proved an impressive encore.

 

Host Jimmy Kimmel Entertained Between the Awards

 

The show was hosted for the third time by late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, 55 — no stranger to Oscar debacles, having presided over the ceremony in 2017 when La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner instead of Moonlight.

Kimmel’s opening monologue was equal parts sweet and edgy, and very funny, with mention of films being seen again in theatres, before segueing into a good-hearted bow to the many first-time nominees from Yeoh to Fraser to Quan. Kimmel noted the latter two were in a film together 30 years ago: Encino Man, which of course led to an easy dig at actor Pauly Shore. But it also prefaced a gobsmacked realization that both were now up for (and ultimately won) Oscars.

Steven Spielberg, 76, was in for both kidding and kudos in Kimmel’s monologue. He was noted as the first director to be nominated across six decades, then jokingly had his sobriety questioned while making ET. Kimmel added that Spielberg’s musical sidekick on The Fabelmans, John Williams, who turned 91 last month, was the oldest nominee in Oscar history and has been nominated 53 times — a tally bested only by Walt Disney — and has won five. “Which honestly is not that great,” Kimmel joked.

As it happened, Williams lost Best Original Score to Volker Bertelmann who collected for All Quiet on the Western Front, one of several craft awards the German war drama nabbed on the evening, including Production Design, Cinematography (James Friend) and Best International Feature.

Kimmel also made a sharp crack about Babylon losing money, and about Canadian director James Cameron not showing up. “You know a show is too long when even James Cameron can’t sit through it.” Was it because Cameron wasn’t nominated for directing? “How could the Academy not nominate the director of Avatar,” Kimmel asked. “What do they think he is … a woman?”

He also noted that Tom Cruise was absent. “The two guys who insisted we go to the theatre didn’t come to the [Dolby] theatre.”

All that gave way to the expected cracks about violence not being tolerated during this year’s show, with cameras panning to audience members from Andrew Garfield to Michael B. Jordan to Yeoh, who Kimmel warned would intercept, and mangle, any offenders.

He then warned Oscar-winning blabbers that they wouldn’t be played off the stage but danced off by the cast members of RRR.

And perhaps the cheekiest moment of the night came when Kimmel asked the audience to vote by text if recently deceased Baretta actor Robert Blake should be included in the In Memoriam segment. He wasn’t.

Perhaps not ground-breaking, but very amusing at the midway mark, was Visual Effects presenter and Cocaine Bear director Elizabeth Banks flanked by a guy in a bad bear costume.

Banks rather compellingly noted that, “Without visual effects, Cocaine Bear would have been some guy in a bear suit, probably without cocaine.”

Avatar: The Way of Water won the category, but folks will remember the bear. Not quite “The Slap,” but a safe and very respectable guffaw.

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