A Best Picture champ hasn’t won multiple acting Oscars in a long time, but ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ can end that dry spell

Joyce Eng
·4 min read
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Since the Oscars have adopted the preferential ballot, voters have been spreading the wealth. A Best Picture champ hasn’t taken home more than four awards in 11 years. Sometimes they might carry an acting award with the top prize, but definitely not two. But that might all change on Sunday. With “Everything Everywhere All at Once” poised for a big sweep, it could be the first Best Picture winner in the expanded era and the first in 18 years to win more than one acting award.

In the 13 years with the preferential ballot, there have been seven Best Picture winners that also nabbed an acting trophy. They are 2010’s “The King’s Speech” (Colin Firth, Best Actor), 2011’s “The Artist” (Jean Dujardin, Best Actor), 2013’s “12 Years a Slave” (Lupita Nyong’o, Best Supporting Actress), 2016’s “Moonlight” (Mahershala Ali, Best Supporting Actor), 2018’s “Green Book” (Ali again, also in supporting actor), 2020’s “Nomadland” (Frances McDormand, Best Actress) and 2021’s “CODA” (Troy Kotsur, Best Supporting Actor).

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The six Best Picture winners that were blanked in acting are “The Hurt Locker” (2009), “Argo” (2012), “Birdman” (2014), “Spotlight” (2015), “The Shape of Water” (2017) and “Parasite” (2019). All had at least one acting bid except for “Parasite,” which had none.

During this time, there were films that scored multiple acting Oscars, but they didn’t win Best Picture. “The Fighter” (2010) bagged the supporting prizes for Melissa Leo and Christian Bale. “Dallas Buyers Club” (2013) swept the male categories for Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto. And most recently, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017) won Best Actress for McDormand and Best Supporting Actor for Sam Rockwell. All three were Best Picture nominees, but “Three Billboards” was arguably the only one that came the closest to winning Best Picture.

SEE ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ eyes an unprecedented above-the-line Oscar sweep

There are many reasons why a Best Picture champ has had trouble winning more than one acting award — from the competition in each category, which often has a season-long acting sweeper/frontrunner, to the strengths of the top film not based in acting — but even in the pre-preferential era, it wasn’t all that frequent for the Best Picture winner to collect multiple statuettes for its stars. The most recent one to achieve this was “Million Dollar Baby” (2004), which took Best Actress for Hilary Swank and Best Supporting Actor for Morgan Freeman. There were two instances in the ’90s: “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), one of three films that won the Big Five, winning for leads Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, and “Shakespeare in Love” (1998) going two for two in the actress races for Gwyneth Paltrow and Judi Dench.

With four acting nominations, “Everything Everywhere” had always felt secure (even with the BAFTA blip) to win at least one: Best Supporting Actor for Ke Huy Quan. But now it can legitimately win three. After dominating the guilds, including a record four Screen Actors Guild Awards, “Everything Everywhere” could see all three of its individual SAG champs bask in Oscar glory. Michelle Yeoh has displaced Cate Blanchett (“TÁR”) for the top spot in the Best Actress odds, and while Jamie Lee Curtis remains in third place in the supporting actress rankings, behind Angela Bassett (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) and Kerry Condon (“The Banshees of Inisherin”), that race has been unstable all season and she could benefit from the adoration for her film and her unrewarded veteran status. She’s already proven she can beat her own co-star, Stephanie Hsu, and Bassett, the Golden Globe and Critics Choice champ who has the same narrative as she does. Condon has the BAFTA, but “Everything Everywhere” is a stronger film than “Banshees.”

Two acting prizes for “Everything Everywhere” seems doable at this point, but if it does pull off three, watch out. Only two films have snared three acting Oscars, “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) and “Network” (1976), but neither won Best Picture or Best Director, two categories the A24 hit is expected to win. So “Everything Everywhere” could make even more Oscar history.

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