Long Covid isn’t as much of a mystery as it used to be.
Three years since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in the US, the syndrome known as “long Covid” remains one of its chief mysteries.
Those mysteries include what the syndrome even is. The long-term fatigue and brain fog some people report after recovering from an acute infection are the symptoms most commonly associated with long Covid, but more than 200 distinct symptoms have been reported. The novel coronavirus may also change people’s cardiovascular systems permanently in ways that could lead to long-term health problems, even strokes and heart attacks. Is it all long Covid?
There are other elusive questions: How frequently do people get long Covid? Who is at the highest risk of developing it? And what is causing these long-term symptoms in the first place?
The remaining uncertainties can mask the scientific progress of the past few years. Scientists have a better idea of how long Covid works, and why it might cause a wide array of seemingly unconnected symptoms.
But — and this is more important than it might seem — we know what we don’t know. We have a stronger sense of what the most important unanswered questions are and where there is genuine debate among even the experts about this bedeviling condition.
The highly charged public discourse over long Covid can be overwhelming. There is a plethora of research being released at all times, some of it well-vetted, but some of it not. If you or someone you love has long Covid — or you’re worried that you might get it — it can be hard to get even basic answers.
One of the clearest takeaways of the past three years is this: Long Covid does not look the same in every patient.
”I think that consensus exists at this point to say, there is no one underlying cause of long Covid,” said David Putrino, who is leading research efforts at Mount Sinai. “Because there are many types of long Covid.”
But scientists are getting closer to resolving some of these debates. Everyone I spoke to agreed long Covid is a real physiological syndrome. The physical evidence that some people’s bodies function differently in the long term after a Covid infection is too strong to chalk up to psychosomatic symptoms or some kind of neurological disorder.
“If you’re someone who follows really high-quality research, you have to acknowledge that there are organic causes for illness in long Covid,” Putrino said. “It is not psychosomatic.”
Still, the lack of consistency has been confounding for researchers, doctors, and patients alike. Even so, evidence is growing that antiviral medication and other treatments may go a long way to reducing and even eliminating long Covid symptoms, regardless of their cause. Doctors and researchers might not have to fully understand the disease in order to successfully treat it. For patients, none of these questions matter as much as what can be done to make them feel better.
That future is finally getting closer. It is a sign of how far the science has come in the past three years. But there is still much work to do. The ongoing research and debate over long Covid can be broken down into at least four buckets.
- The most obvious question: How common is it?
Post-viral syndromes are not new, but given the number of people infected over the past three years, long Covid has been recognized as a distinct public health threat. The scale of the crisis depends, at least in part, on how many people end up with long-term symptoms. But that is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
That is partly because of how varied the symptoms are; most studies rely on patients self-reporting symptoms, so results will vary based on the respondent. A meta-analysis out of the UK published last year in Nature reviewed nine studies that collectively included more than 1 million reported Covid cases in that country. Not all of the studies used the same definition, some including any symptoms and others counting only those that prevented the patient from doing their everyday activities. But, in general, they defined long Covid as symptoms that were still present 12 weeks after the initial infection.
Even experts who believe long Covid is quite prevalent can give wide ranges, anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of patients. The UK meta-analysis found that between 8 and 17 percent of patients said they still had symptoms 12 weeks after their initial infection; between 1 and 5 percent said that they were experiencing debilitating symptoms. Women, people who were older, and people who were in worse health prior to the pandemic were more likely to say they were experiencing long Covid.
That study still left plenty of uncertainty about exactly how common the syndrome actually is; the top end of the range would be twice the rate of the low end.
The frequency of long Covid may also be occurring less frequently as more people gain immunity through vaccination and natural infection, and as the virus itself evolves. Another UK-based study published in the Lancet last year compared reports of long Covid during the summer 2021 wave of the delta variant to reports after omicron became the dominant variant in the winter of 2022. It found a 10 percent rate of long Covid during delta that dropped to a 4 to 5 percent rate once omicron took over.
While much of the public discourse has focused on such calculations, they would be irrelevant if doctors had the tools to treat long Covid.
- The first-order question: What actually causes long Covid?
More than 100 million Americans have had a recorded case of Covid-19. Most of them do not end up reporting having long-term symptoms. So why do some people develop this syndrome and others don’t? And for the first group, what is happening in their body to make them feel this way?
It likely starts with the health of the patient. People who have a severe case of Covid and are admitted to the hospital are much more likely to have symptoms that persist for months. People who have a milder initial infection are more likely to experience long Covid if they are older, or if they were in poorer physical and mental health prior to being infected. Women also report higher rates of long Covid than men.
But knowing who may be more susceptible to long Covid is not the same as knowing why these people have long-term symptoms. A few theories are particularly popular with people who study long Covid.
One leading candidate is the idea that some people fail to fully eliminate the virus after infection, leaving remnants to hide away in their bodies only to later cause havoc. It is known as viral persistence and most (but not all) of the long Covid experts I spoke with said that it is likely a factor in many, maybe even most, people having long-term symptoms.
“There is not the one long Covid driver, the one long Covid marker,” Amy Proal at the PolyBio Research Foundation, whose team has been examining viral persistence in long Covid patients, told me. “But what does seem the most straightforward to anyone really reading the literature is that some patients are not fully clearing the virus.”
A February 2023 study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases found that people with long Covid had the coronavirus’s telltale spike protein in their blood 12 months after their infection.
The idea of viral persistence could be a skeleton key that unlocks the mystery of all the various and seemingly unrelated symptoms that long Covid patients report. Proal pointed to autopsy-based research published in Nature in December 2022 that found the coronavirus lurking all over the body months after infection.
The symptoms that an individual experiences could be related to where exactly the virus has taken up residence, she said. If it’s in your brain, you may experience more confusion and brain fog. If it hunkers down in your muscle tissue, you might feel the chronic fatigue heavily associated with long Covid.
But some experts are not as sure about the link between viral persistence and long Covid, without stronger evidence that the virus is still actively replicating, which Proal and others said is the subject of study. Some people who do not report long-term symptoms have also been found to have the coronavirus’s spike protein in their blood, complicating the picture even further.
And there could be other drivers of long Covid in play. For example, there is growing evidence that a coronavirus infection can lead to latent viruses that people already have in their bodies, such as the herpes virus, being reactivated.
At this point, some candidates for long Covid’s causes have stronger evidence than others. Researchers floated other theories earlier in the pandemic, such as the idea that Covid could contribute to auto-immune diseases, in which white blood cells attack healthy cells in a person’s body because they can no longer distinguish between good and bad cells. This now appears less likely, although it can’t be fully ruled out.
Akiko Iwasaki, a long Covid researcher at Yale University, summarized the current understanding of long Covid’s causes like this: “I wouldn’t say we’ve ruled in or ruled out anything yet.” Proal shared a similar sentiment: “In science, we never say we’re sure. Things may change.”
But, according to Iwasaki, scientists have still learned a lot. Viral persistence is clearly happening; the question is whether and how that could be a mechanism for long Covid. There’s also evidence for the reactivation of other viruses, though it is an open question whether that is a driver of long Covid or merely a symptom of a person’s immune system functioning poorly after being battered by the virus.
- The most puzzling question for scientists: What is going on with the micro-blood clots?
There is another common feature of long Covid that still cannot be classified as either a cause or a symptom of the syndrome: tiny blood clots found in people after they have a coronavirus infection. After some people have a coronavirus infection, they can develop tiny blood clots. People who have had Covid have a higher risk of heart attack and stroke for months after their infection, and researchers posit that the micro-blood clots could be a cause. The role of the micro-blood clots is among the most confounding questions that researchers are exploring.
What makes it one of the most crucial areas of study is that Covid’s disruption of a person’s cardiovascular system could be a “silent killer,” in the words of South African researcher Resia Pretorius.
Most people may think of Covid-19 as a respiratory disease, but one of the key lessons of the past few years is the havoc the virus wreaks on a patient’s cardiovascular system. Various studies have found people in the middle of an acute Covid-19 infection can experience injuries to their heart muscle, the kind that can portend a heart attack or pulmonary embolism. And studies have found that heart injury during an infection was associated with a higher risk of death from Covid itself.
As Pretorius put it, though most people associate the coronavirus with respiratory issues, “we learned very early on that this is also a vascular disease.”
That has led researchers to probe whether that disruption is also contributing to people experiencing long-term symptoms. Multiple studies have found that people face a higher risk of heart attack or stroke after a Covid-19 infection, whether or not they had a severe case and regardless of whether they experience chronic symptoms after recovering from their initial infection.
But the science on the role of these micro-clots in explaining other symptoms commonly associated with long Covid is still unsettled.
The existence of these clots in people who have recovered from an acute infection is substantial. Pretorius led a study published in Cardiovascular Diabetology in August 2021 that found “large, anomalous” deposits of amyloid proteins — micro-clots — in people with long Covid.
But even she acknowledged that the connection between those clots and long-term symptoms remains a mystery. Different patients have different pathologies. Some appear to have small clots during their acute infection, but their body recuperates and they can go on and live their lives without side effects. Others seem to have persistent clots and symptoms that eventually go away on their own after a few months. A third group develops problems with blood clots that start during their Covid infection and then never go away. That is the group Pretorius worries about most.
“In the patients who struggle the most, their whole vasculature is compromised,” she said.
But scientists still haven’t reached a consensus on how these clots may contribute to long Covid symptoms. Some believe they may not be important at all. Others, such as Proal, wonder if they are connected to viral persistence; perhaps these clots are the result of the virus still circulating in a person’s blood.
But that is just a theory, for now. Science still needs more time to reach a satisfying answer.
- The most important question for patients: How do we treat long Covid?
These unanswered questions about causes, prevalence, one syndrome or multiple, all lead to the biggest question of all: What can medicine do about it?
The pandemic itself has changed. Most people now have some exposure to the virus, whether from vaccination, infection, or both, and that immunity appears to be associated with fewer reports of long Covid, experts told me. That effect may be compounded if the more recent evolutions of the virus have also made it less severe, as people who end up in the hospital are at a much high risk to have long-term symptoms.
But those developments should not breed complacency. Scientists are still learning about the longer-term risks for people who have milder infections. As Proal put it to me, even if 1 percent of cases lead to long Covid, “that’s still a disaster because so many people are still getting infected all the time.”
But with treatment, as with the understanding of the mechanics of long Covid, medicine has made important progress in the past three years. There is promising but still preliminary evidence that taking Paxlovid, the antiviral medication, is associated with lower rates of long Covid. That would make sense if some of the problem can be traced back to viral persistence. If people are struggling to clear the coronavirus out of their bodies of their own, Paxlovid could help them finish the job — and that would in turn make them less likely to experience lasting symptoms.
If the mechanics of long Covid are more multifaceted, then patients may need more personalized treatments, with each patient getting a cocktail tailored to their symptoms. Physicians might prioritize anticoagulation for cardiovascular symptoms. Iwasaki noted evidence that some long Covid patients have low levels of the hormone cortisol. Prior to the pandemic, giving cortisol to patients with chronic fatigue syndrome — which has been suggested by some experts as a useful analogue to long Covid — hadn’t panned out in clinical trials. But it’s too soon to say it wouldn’t work and more investigation is warranted, she said.
Thinking outside the box may also be necessary. Just as researchers discovered that existing drugs, such as dexamethasone, could improve outcomes during an acute case, now scientists are experimenting with a variety of existing treatments to see if they help with long Covid. One pre-print paper, released this week, found the diabetic medication metformin had appeared to reduce the risk of long Covid for patients who received it after contracting the virus.
In the end, some of the unanswered questions about long Covid may not need to be answered in order to find effective treatments, and researchers are getting closer to knowing how best to treat it. Doctors are desperate for more information as they struggle to help patients who are still reporting health problems long after their initial infection.
There may not be a single study, a single discovery that resolves all of these debates. But with time, long Covid is becoming less of a mystery.
“I don’t think there will ever be a long Covid breakthrough,” Proal said. “It’s going to be a growing understanding.”
Winner: Donkeys. Loser: Anyone craving drama.
The 95th Academy Awards went off without a hitch — and, as host Jimmy Kimmel made sure to remind us, without “Hitch,” er, Will Smith. Banned from the ceremony after last year’s infamous slap, Smith wasn’t the only prominent celebrity to skip this year’s awards, which took place at the familiar Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles Sunday night. Major nominees like Tom Cruise and James Cameron were absent, which made this year’s ceremony feel a little less devoted to star-gazing and more devoted to navel-gazing. (Did we really need a segment about how great Warner Bros. is?)
Still, the awards held quite a bit of charm in between the two biggest sweeps of the night: a technical coup for war epic All Quiet on the Western Front and a sweep of nearly every major award including Best Picture — every award, everywhere! — for this year’s clearly beloved favorite, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. (For more on the night’s winner to end all winners, check out Alissa Wilkinson here.)
Even if you’re not an Oscars junkie, we defy you not to be just a little charmed by this year’s highlights. Like M. M. Keeravani, the composer of “Naatu” from global Tollywood hit RRR, winning India’s first Academy Award for Best Song and improvising a speech to the tune of the Carpenters’ “Top of the World.” Or Ke Huy Quan’s ebullient joy when he sealed one of the year’s best comeback narratives by winning Best Supporting Actor for Everything, Everywhere and giving us a spontaneous TED talk on the collective wellspring of genius and creativity. Or those Irish guys singing “Happy Birthday” to that other Irish guy! James! Happy birthday, James!
The little moments of humanity peeking out beneath the glitz and glam are truly what make the Oscars worth tuning in for. This year was markedly apolitical — though kudos to “the Daniels” (Everything, Everywhere directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan) for shouting out support for drag queens everywhere in the wake of Tennessee’s controversial new transphobic law banning drag performers — but the mood in the room was surprisingly hopeful. As Quan reminded the room through tears, this night may be a little campy and ridiculous, but it’s also what the American dream looks like. Here’s to many more banal Oscar nights to come.
Here are our picks for this year’s winners and losers.
Winner: All Quiet on the Western Front
Did anyone see All Quiet on the Western Front? If you skipped, I do not blame you. I do not have much tolerance for a “war is terrible’’ movie that is just two and a half hours of war.
But I am (we are?) not the Academy that rewarded AQOTWF with four Oscars, including Best Cinematography, Best International Film, and Best Original Score. That Best International Film win seemed predictable — AQOTWF was the only movie in that category also nominated for Best Picture. Less predictable is the fact that the film was pretty disliked in its native Germany, the country it won the award for. One of the biggest critiques from Germans about this German film based on a German book was that it had strayed too far from the source material for the sake of … an Oscar. —Alex Abad-Santos
Loser: Disney
This year’s Oscars aired on ABC, the network owned by Disney. Unfortunately, the very successful entertainment company didn’t have its best night. Angela Bassett, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Wakanda Forever, lost to Jamie Lee Curtis. Turning Red, the company’s bid in the Best Animated Feature Film category, also lost. And in an awkward move, Disney premiered the trailer for The Little Mermaid remake during the ceremony. Reader, that trailer did not look great on my television screen.
Ruth Carter did win for Best Costume Design for Wakanda Forever, an award she won in 2019 for the original Black Panther, and Avatar: The Way of Water won for Best Visual Effects. But overall, it could’ve been a better night for the House of Mouse, especially on its home turf. —Alex Abad-Santos
Winner: White Gowns
Whether it was in an attempt to match with the “champagne” (read: beige) carpet or out of a widely-held conviction that the Oscars should look more like a mass wedding ceremony, a surprising number of A-listers showed up to the ceremony in sparkling white.
Among the nominees, Michelle Yeoh wore feathery white Dior, Michelle Williams wore a white Chanel column with attached capelet, Ana de Armas wore sparkling nude Louis Vuitton, and Paul Mescal wore a white Gucci tux. Among the presenters, Mindy Kaling was in peekaboo white Vera Wang, Emily Blunt was in off-the-shoulder white Valentino, Eva Longoria in white Zuhair Murad, Halle Berry in Tamara Ralph, and Ariana DeBose wore custom Versace Deco-style. Scattered through the audience: Rooney Mara in white Alexander McQueen, Harry Shum Jr. in white Adeam, musical performer Sofia Carson in bridal Giambattista Valli, and Tems in show-stopping Lessja Verlingieri.
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Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
(Jimmy Kimmel also changed into a white tux halfway through the ceremony, explaining that he spilled guacamole on the black tux he’d worn earlier. We don’t think that counts, though.)
That’s just a lot of white! It’s a lot of white, especially for a ceremony where people usually show up in punchy jewel tones that will pop on Instagram. We don’t know what to tell you except that white: It’s having a moment. —Constance Grady
Winner: The Irish
It was the year of the Irish Oscars, with a whopping total of 14 nominations for Irish films, actors, and filmmakers. A lot of that was thanks to The Banshees of Inisherin, which nabbed four of the 20 acting nominee slots, with Aftersun’s Paul Mescal taking a fifth. Banshees also saw nods for writer-director Martin McDonagh as well as Best Original Score, Best Editing, and Best Picture. Meanwhile, The Quiet Girl was nominated for Best International Film, the first Irish-language film to earn that distinction. The live-action short An Irish Goodbye won in its category. Irishman Richard Baneham was on the Oscar-winning visual effects team for Avatar: The Way of Water, and Jonathan Redmond was nominated for editing Elvis.
Not a bad showing for the week leading up to St. Patrick’s Day — and the Irish press took note. But a stealth winner here is also the Irish language, which UNESCO lists as endangered, a fact with a long history rooted in a colonialist attempt to suppress it as English was imposed. Earlier in the season, Mescal garnered cheers from the Irish press when he spoke Irish with a red-carpet reporter, for the first time in his public career. It struck a chord with Irish observers, who learn the language in school but sometimes hesitate to speak it. Banshees’ Brendan Gleeson also gave an interview in Irish, while co-star Colin Farrell expressed regret for not doing so. And upon his win, Baneham spoke in Irish, too: “Go raibh míle maith agat,” he said. Roughly translated: A thousand thanks. —Alissa Wilkinson
Loser: Fat people and fat suits
Fat people, even very fat people, are defined by more than their bodies. But Hollywood has a long history of portraying fat people as socially awkward loners obsessed with food and disordered eating, using fat suits for famous actors who play into those dehumanizing caricatures and stereotypes.
Much has been written about the fat-shaming aspects of Aronofsky’s The Whale, but no amount of criticism can overcome Hollywood’s love for a physical transformation. While many consider Brendan Fraser’s performance moving, the fact is fatness is most prominently presented on film as a suit thin people slip into. The film’s win for best makeup design — which included an awards voice-over praising the way the fat suit “pushed Fraser’s weight into the severest extreme“ — was regressive and insulting to all the strides fat actors and creators have made in Hollywood.
Fraser’s win for Best Actor may have been more about his Hollywood comeback in the eyes of the Academy, but the legacy of his performance will be about Hollywood’s fatphobia. “Who would want me to be a part of their life?” his character asks. As long as we refuse to allow fat people to control their own narratives, we’ll never have an honest answer to that hideous question. —Aja Romano
Winner: Donkeys
There were three donkeys in this year’s Oscar class (appearing in Banshees of Inisherin, EO, and Triangle of Sadness), but only one donkey actually appeared onstage at the Oscars telecast. In our expert opinion, this was a misfire: There should always be more donkeys.
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Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
In this case, the donkey was sweet Jenny from Banshees of Inisherin. (At least, that’s what they told us, although a conspiracy theory is flourishing online that the donkey wasn’t Jenny. Regardless, we have a strong pro-donkey stance here at Vox.com.) Batting her long eyelashes, she took command of the stage with effortless star power. “Look, it’s your friend, Colin Farrell,” said host Jimmy Kimmel, and from his seat toward the front, Farrell blew his co-star (or an imposter thereof!) a kiss. International film star Jenny or nameless nobody, that donkey handily delivered the most charming moment of the evening. —Constance Grady
Loser: Hollywood’s failure to build new movie stars
Traditionally, the Oscars gets a pop of energy from the glamour of the whole show: all those movie stars, beautiful and otherworldly creatures of the big screen, smiling gamely in one room together. Their presence brings an outsize gravitas to what is, at the end of the day, an industry shindig, which then proves ripe for puncturing by the host.
That glamour and gravitas is growing steadily more elusive, probably because true movie stars keep getting rarer. The era in which we saw movie actors only in the dim sanctity of the movie theater is gone, and now that we’ve dragged them onto our phone screens, they’re all a lot smaller than they used to be. So while this year’s Oscars was filled with attractive, talented, charismatic actors, Our Lady of the AMC Nicole Kidman had to hold down the star power quotient alone, a shimmering reminder of the kind of icon Hollywood used to be able to turn out and no longer can.
There are some big positives to our new and more human era. For one thing, the Oscars are rewarding figures they used to ignore in favor of their preferred icons, netting awards to people like Brendan Fraser and Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. All the same, Movies’ Biggest Night has lost a little of that familiar shine. —Constance Grady
Winner: Musical numbers
The Best Original Song category isn’t usually a big part of the Oscars because, after all, this is a night to celebrate movies — and the music that usually gets celebrated is a song that plays during the credits, when the movie’s effectively over.
But this year was an exception, full of spectacle and joy. Lady Gaga gave us a stripped-down version of her soaring Top Gun ballad “Hold My Hand.” Rihanna, fresh off a seemingly casual Super Bowl performance, sounded fantastic performing Wakanda Forever’s “Lift Me Up.” Stephanie Hsu, Son Lux, and David Byrne gave us hot dog fingers in a trippy performance of “This Is a Life” from Everything Everywhere All At Once. Sofia Carson and Diane Warren’s rendition of “Applause” from Tell It Like a Woman made me want to learn more about this movie. And the category winner, “Naatu Naatu” from RRR, was absolutely joyous.
Musical-number enthusiast Ariana DeBose would be thrilled with tonight’s vindicating performances. —Alex Abad-Santos
Loser: Anyone hoping for a big gaffe
If you were on pins and needles hoping for a repeat of last year’s slap, you were out of luck. While it may have run a little long, this year’s Oscars was almost painfully benign. Everyone from the donkeys to the cocaine bear was on their best behavior, and even the award-winners mostly kept their speeches short. Presenter Elizabeth Banks did have a near stumble — those long Oscar-dress hems are a hazard — but she played it off like the pro she is, even while presenting next to the aforementioned bear. Even Kimmel resisted the urge to overplay his hand by making too many Slap jokes. Still, the final note of the night spoke to a production that may have perhaps been a little on edge: As he walked offstage, Kimmel flipped a placard reading “Oscars without incident” from “0” to “1.” So far, so good — until next year. —Aja Romano
It’s the end of predictable Oscar winners.
They did it. Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once — which, despite its maximalist name, isn’t a “big” movie, like some of its fellow Best Picture nominees — won the big prize. It’s not the sort of film directors make assuming it will win them Best Picture. Weird, sweet, and frenetic, shot on a modest budget and released in the spring, it started slow, with a limited rollout. But once it began picking up steam, it became a force to be reckoned with.
The reason was old-fashioned and simple: word of mouth. Not just casual recommendations, but exuberant word of mouth. People who saw Everything Everywhere tended to at least like it — and, in many cases, fall head over heels for it. It’s a multiverse action comedy-drama about immigrant parents who run a laundromat that’s getting audited by the IRS, but also, there’s an evil bagel. There are martial arts and hot dog fingers; there are rocks with googly eyes; there are tributes to Ratatouille and to the films of Wong Kar Wai and the tuneful stylings of one-hit-wonder band Nine Days. Audiences tweeted and called their moms and brought their friends.
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A24
Importantly, the only place you could see it for a long while was at the movies. In a world where the time from movie screen to streaming is shrinking rapidly, this one waited it out in theaters for a couple months, and that gave the movie plenty of runway for theatrical viewing and box office buzz.
And, oh, it was a great movie to see in a theater. Yes, it’s a spectacle movie, with plenty of effects and fights and fun sound design and, of course, a plot involving the multiverse. But I suspect what Everything Everywhere did best was remind people of the fun of seeing a movie together. To laugh, and also cry together. To shriek and be moved and walk out of the room excited. To maybe see yourself on screen, or to feel your yearnings for an honest connection with your parent or child reflected.
The result was a low- to medium-budget movie (around $15 million) that made a lot of money (over $100 million), and money is the language Hollywood speaks best. But it also had a set of stars with real charisma and a long history in the movies — three of whom won Oscars themselves — and a very enthusiastic fan base and, as many people repeated over the awards season as the film picked up steam, a lot of heart. All this from two guys whose most notable work to date was a lot of music videos and a strangely moving film about a farting corpse.
For a long while, it seemed like it couldn’t win. Academy winners tend to be something like a consensus pick, the movie most people liked a lot, rather than movies that proved divisive. For decades, it’s seemed as though the Academy only favored films that appealed to its mostly older, mostly American, mostly white membership: prestige dramas and historical epics and movies about the movies. A certain kind of film, termed “Oscar bait,” would emerge as the frontrunner early in the fall and stay that way. If you wanted an Oscar, you knew what you had to do.
But this win suggests the era of easily predictable Best Picture winners might really be over. You can learn something about the business from the winners — especially Best Picture. And this is the latest in a line of surprises (like Moonlight, The Shape of Water, and CODA) that defied conventional Oscar wisdom. That is certainly due, in part, to the expanding membership, which is changing the demographics of the Academy, and with it diversifying the tastes of its body.
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A24
Yet that might not be the only reason it won. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Hollywood is in a lot of trouble because, well, it is. The double whammy of the pandemic and the studios’ rush to embrace streaming has left the industry reeling, and even before the last few years, the decision to increasingly focus resources on megabudget global-audience blockbusters has left midbudget movies, the kind that were commonplace 25 years ago, in the lurch. “I have great faith in our stories,” director Daniel Kwan, one-half of the Everything Everywhere directing duo known as Daniels, said in his Best Picture acceptance speech. “These stories have changed my life, and I know that they’ve done that for generations.”
“I know that we’ll get through this,” he said, and if you thought about who he was talking to, you knew what he meant.
So it’s reasonable to wonder if some of the love for Everything Everywhere All at Once from the Academy — which still sees itself, for better or worse, as the guardians and promoters of the American film industry — has to do with excitement. There’s the fun of seeing people like Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, who’ve worked their whole lives with far less recognition than they deserve, win awards all season long. There’s the exhilaration of proving that, contrary to popular Hollywood wisdom, American audiences are ready and eager to see a film that’s partly in Mandarin, that is about an immigrant family, and that doesn’t have a familiar property (or, indeed, anything familiar at all) behind it.
But there’s also the fact that this is a movie with an original, inventive screenplay that mashes up genres and managed to make a huge profit on a modest investment. Wouldn’t that be worth voting for? If a movie like this can earn money and plaudits, does it represent Hollywood’s future, or maybe its salvation?
Hard to say. Everything Everywhere All at Once is so original that the idea of it spawning imitations is dispiriting. And there’s an element to it that feels very much like catching lightning in a bottle.
Still, its seven-Oscar sweep is significant and worthy of pausing on. Sometimes it feels like Hollywood’s hopelessly lost its way. But even if you didn’t really love Everything Everywhere All at Once — or if you’re among its biggest fans or anything in between — its big night at the Oscars could signal good things ahead.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is available to stream on Showtime and to purchase on digital platforms.