With Michelle Yeoh’s historic win at Sunday’s Academy Awards for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the genre-bending sci-fi film has achieved a feat that has only happened twice before in Oscars history and for the first time in 46 years.
Alongside supporting cast members Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis, Yeoh has made “Everything Everywhere” the third film in history to win three acting Oscars.
The first film to achieve that trifecta was “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1951, with Vivien Leigh winning Best Actress for her performance as the tragic Blanche DuBois with Kim Hunter and Karl Malden winning supporting Oscars for playing Stella Kowalski and Blanche’s potential husband Mitch, respectively.
Twenty-six years later, Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet’s satire of broadcast news, “Network,” became the second film to achieve three acting wins. Peter Finch, who died two months before the ceremony, became the first actor to win a posthumous Oscar for his performance as the “Mad Prophet of the Airwaves” Howard Beale, with Faye Dunaway winning Best Actress as the corrupt network executive Diane Christensen and Beatrice Straight setting a record by winning Best Supporting Actress with just over five minutes of screen time, the least of any Oscar winner.
Now, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” joins this rare club, with Yeoh and Quan winning for their performances as the married multiverse adventurers Evelyn and Waymond Wang, with Curtis joining them for her performance as IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre, who is auditing Evelyn’s laundromat in one universe and is married to her in another one where everyone has sausages for fingers.
This isn’t the only history-making Oscar moment for “Everything Everywhere All at Once. Yeoh’s win makes her the first Asian women to win a Best Actress Oscar. The movie is also the first comedy to win Best Film editing. Directors the Daniels are the just the third duo to win Best Director. And the film had staying power as it had the earliest release date for all Best Picture winners in 31 years.
