By: Lena Smith '24
Caution: if you click on the link to the second post mentioned in the article, please be wary of expletives and offensive language in the public comments.
Photo Courtesy of Business Insider and Jeff Kravitz
How could the coveted golden statue be a loss? As strange as that sounds, a film that achieves this high honor in the industry may suffer a paradoxical shift in attitudes following the Academy Awards. Though the monetary benefits of winning the major categories are indisputable- where even a nomination for the top prize bumps up box office earnings by millions- a negative pushback lurks behind these promising statistics.
Specifically, winning this accolade puts a film in the hot seat. Sure, it gains the ‘Oscar-winner’ status that eventually finds its way into advertisements following the awards, but it can also augment negative attitudes toward the film. Now, the increase in exposure that a film garners from the awards cycle inevitably attracts more fans as well as more haters, just by virtue of having more people in the audience. But an interesting facet of this is the recurring pattern of how the ‘hype’ of a movie will dampen the overall attitude toward the film in question.
The most recent Best Picture winner, Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), is a topical and prime example of this proposed phenomenon. Directed by The Daniels, the 2023 film made history by becoming the most-awarded film of all time. With such critical recognition, the notion of negative pushback certainly makes an appearance.
Let’s take a look at Letterboxd for an explanation. This social media service dedicated to film discussion and reviewing acts as a helpful litmus test for opinions on movies, especially given its recent rise in popularity. The rating average for Everything Everywhere All At Once is 4.4 out of 5 stars, marking it as the 23rd highest-ranked movie on the service. But the introduction of awards season has subjected the film to a new wave of negativity despite its apparent quality. An easy way to see this in action is to look at the difference in reception on their Instagram page.
On May 13, 2022, Letterboxd posted an image from the film to commemorate its UK release, months before any of the major film awards like the Oscars, Screen Actors Guild, or Golden Globes released their nominations to the public. Though the operationalizations for ‘positive’ comments can vary, the sentiments about the film were largely appreciative: there were 32 comments, and 11 out of the 14 posts that referenced the movie directly were in favor of the film*. However, following the film’s Best Picture win, Letterboxd posted another image commemorating the film to a different effect. First off, the number of comments increased dramatically to 103*, reflecting the high exposure following the Oscars. This suggests that negative comments would naturally increase as more people flock towards it, but following the Academy Awards, the percentage of dissatisfied users flew beyond that of the older post. For individual commenters, the negative sentiments rose from just 8 percent in the previous post to 44 percent in the Oscar post. There were also various comments insinuating that The Daniels’ success stemmed from the appeal of diversity in the film, and not the overall quality of the movie- a disappointing explanation for their sweeping successes.
Sound familiar? This sort of issue occurred two years ago with Parasite (Joon-Ho 2019), the first international film to ever win the Best Picture award. Its bold contradiction to the traditional lack of diversity in past years was an incredibly important aspect of its win, and to that point, people used it against it. The idea was that, because Parasite represented a much-welcomed break in the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, it was also the primary reason it received so many accolades. This undermines the caliber of Bong Joon-Ho’s work by attributing his success to having a ‘diverse’ film in comparison to those that normally achieve Academy nominations. Even a movie that ranks no. 2 on Letterboxd faces the same sort of post-awards scrutiny.
But going back to Everything Everywhere All at Once, this kind of criticism was hinted at even before the awards season took place. For a while, EEAAO was actually the top movie on the app and still remains the best-reviewed movie of 2022. The Daniels commented on the former, thanking the effects of “recency bias and just all the hardcore fans who are hyperbolically praising us, giving us five-star reviews.” They themselves undermine their own success by pointing out the reverse: there seem to be positive as well as negative biases toward the film, depending on the context. However, they did echo their agreement with a popular review on the app that reinforces the harsh criticism following the hype of a film, whether that be a high ranking on Letterboxd or a Best Picture win. CosmonautMarkie, a popular film reviewer on Youtube, wrote a review saying “Watch it and have fun before Twitter tells you it’s overrated,” to which Daniel Kwan responded, “this is what releasing a movie in the modern times is like.” Scheinert also sympathized with the comment, acknowledging that he has “read a little too much film Twitter” before seeing “great movies,” insinuating that online film discourse tends to shift attitudes about art in unhelpful ways.
The onslaught of criticism is not inherently a bad thing. The idea that Oscar-winning films are prodded for quality after their success is a good indicator of healthy skepticism toward the Academy. The Oscars have always been criticized for leaving out important films in their honors, as well as awarding the wrong films among the group that actually get nominated. Audiences don’t let a movie win Best Picture without some kind of scrutiny, and it often drives the Academy to improve.
But, do be wary of the post-Oscars criticism that finds its way into your feed. While Everything Everywhere All At Once enjoys the fruits of the Academy, it must also face a new wave of skepticism that targets its success.
*as of 3/13 when the data was collected
*as of 3/14 when the data was collected
Note: the old version of this article was posted first, but we have quickly replaced it with the corrected version (free from some clarity errors) at 2:17, April 8th, 2023.