Every Academy Awards ceremony makes history. This year’s was no different! But some movies are more history-making than others. When Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture, it accomplished a number of significant firsts. Given that the movie was released way back in March, you might have forgotten all of the groundbreaking moments in this groundbreaking film. Here are some surprising factoids about this historically important movie to help you entertain your friends and family!
• Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner primarily depicting the lives of Asian Americans.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner that explores the concept of the multiverse.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner featuring a kung fu training montage.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner with substantial subtitled dialogue in Cantonese.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner with substantial subtitled dialogue in Mandarin.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner with substantial subtitled dialogue in Silent Rock Language.
• Though Best Picture winners like Midnight Cowboy and The English Patient have included frank depictions of sexuality, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner to include characters impaling themselves upon butt plugs.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once sets the record for the most disproportionately long fingers ever featured in a Best Picture winner. (The record was previously held by Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.)
• Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner in which an entire tube of lip balm is eaten.
• Many Best Picture winners have included characters based on historical figures. But only Everything Everywhere All at Once has featured a character almost certainly based on a Getty Images photo of an IRS agent.
• In no other Best Picture winner have multiple characters been knocked unconscious by a fanny pack.
• The Daniels’ film is the first Best Picture winner in which a character is brutally beaten with two large, floppy dildos.
• While many Best Picture winners, like The Artist and The Silence of the Lambs, have included memorable dogs, none of them included the dog being swung around on it leash as a weapon à la the deadly ball and chain employed by Gogo Yubari in Kill Bill.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner in which ketchup and mustard appear to be used as a kind of lube-like sexual aid.
• With its depiction of the cutthroat world of hibachi restaurants, Everything Everywhere All at Once becomes the only Best Picture winner featuring a raccoon hidden under a chef’s hat.
• While Toy Story 3 featured Randy Newman singing “We Belong Together,” that movie lost Best Picture to The King’s Speech. So thanks to “Now We’re Cooking,” which Raccacoonie sings with Chad in a brief scene before Raccacoonie tries to murder Evelyn, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner ever to feature Randy Newman singing a song about how two pals really work great as a team.
• No previous Best Picture winner has ever featured a scene of Jamie Lee Curtis stapling something to her own forehead.
• Speaking of heads, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner in which a security guard’s head pops in a shower of confetti.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner with sequences modeled after the work of Wong Kar-Wai and Stanley Kubrick (the hot-dog-hands 2001 parody).
• Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner in which the true villain is a giant everything bagel.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner in which the giant everything bagel is a rich metaphor for depression and suicidal ideation.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once is the first Best Picture winner in which a second-generation queer woman reconciles with her difficult mother despite all the things they can never have in common, because what matters is that they will always be there for each other, no matter how difficult the world may seem.
• What I’m saying here is that Everything Everywhere All at Once is the weirdest, wildest, funniest, most unusual, most flat-out bananas Best Picture winner in Academy Awards history, by a wide margin. For an awards body that, in recent memory, was giving its top prize to boring historical nothingburgers like The King’s Speech and Green Book, that’s pretty freaking great. Whether you love EEAAO or think it’s overrated, whether you were deeply moved by it or simply found it entertaining or even just thought it was a confusing mess, I hope you’ll agree that it can only be good for the movies to give Best Picture to a film as indescribably bizarre as this one.
• Oh, also, no other Best Picture winner has ever been directed by someone whose last movie was about a guy getting fucked to death by a horse. Congratulations!
Update, March 12: This article has been updated to reflect that Everything Everywhere has indeed achieved all of these historic firsts. Read more in Slate about the Oscars.
