A year to the day before Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — collectively known as Daniels — took the Dolby stage to collect the best picture Oscar, the team behind Everything Everywhere Everything at once is on stage at the Paramount Theater in downtown Austin film debut at the 2022 South by Southwest film festival.
The best picture win marks a first for a film debuting in the SXSWnot known for awards movies. Toronto and Telluride have long been considered launching pads for the awards, while recent best picture winners CODA, Nomadlandand Parasite had their premieres at the Sundance Film Festival, Venice and Cannes , respectively. Of this year’s best picture nominees, two had their Cannes debuts (Elvis, Triangle of Sorrow), two bows to Telluride (Woman Talking, Tar), two more at TIFF (All Quiet on the Western Front, The Fabelmans) and had a reputation in Venice for good measure (Banshees of Inisherin). But SXSW has never been considered a best picture springboard.
“We’re not known for picking Oscars movies, obviously. We still have a lot of things that push the edges of what’s allowed,” SXSW film and TV fest programmer Claudette Godfrey said ahead of the 2023 fest’s potential future award at the celebration after the Everything Everywhere. Everything EverywhereThe raucous SXSW premiere — in which the audience went wild and Michelle Yeoh cried on stage — became one of the biggest stories from a festival that also included the film in which Nicolas Cage played a version of himself (Unbearable Weight of Great Talent) and announced by Sandra Bullock an acting sabbatical.
Of course, the A24 movie was never the usual Oscars fare. A genre-bending drama that’s equal parts absurdist and sentimental, It stands out in a field often filled with historical dramas, adaptations, dramatic social critiques, and biopics. (It was also the first Oscar winner to popularize the phrase “hotdog fingers.”)
“The movie popping up was more of a surprise to other people than it was to us, because we’ve been doing the Daniels for a long time,” Godfrey continued.
Kwan and Scheinert have a long history with the festival, having premiered their music videos at SXSW, including for Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What,” which won the SXSW 2015 grand jury award for music videos . “It’s great to have a film that is a fan favorite get this attention and get what it deserves. Not the traditional Oscars film,” said Godfrey.
Coincidentally, the first weekend of this year’s SXSW conflicted with Oscars weekend, leaving some talent and executives with a particularly chaotic travel schedule. Stars like Evan Longoria, who is at the fest with his feature debut Flamin’ Hotand Elisabeth Olsen, who premiered the HBO Max miniseries Love and Deathwill be on the Oscars stage as presenters a day after their respective premieres in Austin.
SXSW has long been seen as consumer-facing. Its program is filled with more comedies and genre films than your typical dramatic festival fare, and studios often use it as a soft launch of their spring releases. Last year’s line-up included The Lost City, which went on to an impressive worldwide box office of nearly $200 million. The 2023 festival opened in Dungeons and Dragons; screening of the latest installments on Evil Dead and John Wick franchises are still coming — not exactly awards contenders.
But in the run of everyone everywhere, which picked up an impressive seven statues on Sunday night, will the industry see the festival as a jumping-off point for non-traditional awards players? This year, Godfrey said, SXSW received the usual amount of inquiries from studios but “maybe have a different idea of what could happen.”