A year ago, the Oscars ceremony was talked about because of a slap in the face: male violence, whatever the intentions, had taken precedence over the rest.
A year later, the slap was still present in Jimmy Kimmel's speech, which made the link with 2022. However, the comparison stops there.
The 2023 Oscars are a completely different proposition from previous seasons.
From the nominations, the change was felt: the possibilities were vast, going in very different directions, taking into account both the most author of Hollywood filmmakers (Steven Spielberg) but also the most imposing blockbuster of recent years (Top
Gun
), as well as an unexpected film, released by an independent studio, the success of which surprised everyone,
Everything Everywhere All At Once
.
For several days, the bets of the American specialized sites and media were going in the direction of a victory for this last film, whose number of nominations was very high: it was found in eleven categories - which supposed that it had an air certain favorite, even if this statistic was not certain as to proven success.
Result: it is indeed this film which is the great winner of the year.
On video,
Everything Everywhere All At Once
, the trailer
The compost of comics
Despite its title, which could have been the pastiche of a bad song by the English band Radiohead,
Everything Everywhere All At Once
takes note of two fundamental elements signifying that a radical change has taken place in the way the world is now perceived.
The first is that the scenarios that now prevail in fiction come from a soil that is called "comics".
The predominant idea of parallel universes, at the center of the film, was popularized by American comics: a handful of scientists had sketched, from the end of the 19th century, the possibility of parallel worlds, then Winston Churchill discreetly resumed their use. in his memoirs.
Before it all became part of pop culture thanks to cartoonist Carmine Infantino and screenwriter Gardner Fox, who imposed the concept of the "multiverse" in 1961 in the story
Flash of Two Worlds
, now seen as ushering in modernity in American comics.
After a while, you no longer know what world you live in: this is somewhat what the idea of the multiverse, of parallel universes, suggests.
The science fiction novelist Michael Moorcock joined them in 1963 in one of the stories of his Eternal Champion cycle.
In the process, many screenwriters and authors of comics or science fiction have used this stratagem of parallel worlds, in permanent coexistence, to build a number of rather very convoluted stories which, put end to end, end up forming sequences narratives so complex that it is regularly necessary to rethink everything.
After a while, you no longer know what world you live in: this is somewhat what the idea of the multiverse, of parallel universes, suggests.
And that resonates strongly with the contemporary world which, since the early 1990s and Francis Fukuyama's theory of the end of history, has seen the progressive abandonment of the idea that the
With
Matrix
, the 2000s had already flirted with a way of reporting on this.
From now on, seems to say the cinema, in the continuation of the comics, everything is possible at the same time, all the time.
It's called a pretty organized mess and it seems to echo the way the 2020s were ushered in (a pandemic, a war, it shook up timelines and perceptions).
Read alsoMatrix was right: how the saga was always one step ahead of the times
Other versions of self
The other major element that emerges from the victory of this film is the fact that it could well inaugurate a form of horoscope in reverse: where the wave of astrology results from a need to clinging to bogus clues offering insights into the future (Theodor Adorno demonstrated long ago, in
Stars Down: The Astrology Column of the Los Angeles Times
, that the texts of the horoscopes are written in a literature intended to give a blow of well-being to the morale of the readers), the possibility of parallel lives, resulting from past choices makes it possible to say that nothing is ever lost, that everything is always possible, that another version of oneself exists elsewhere and that there is always time to join it.
A sort of absurd horoscope that goes against one of the philosophies that underpinned the intellectual construction of the 20th century, that of existentialism: in Albert Camus, Sisyphus, a character from Greek mythology, has no choice about his burden and his existence.
His only option is to be happy despite everything, in a life that will start over forever in the same way.
The 2023 Oscars seem to go against this, rewarding a film that supports the invention of a philosophy that takes as much from the reverse horoscope as from the "wishful
thinking
" already so prevalent in everyday thought: say tell me who you could have been, I will tell you what you can become.
The real good news in all of this is that the Oscar for Best Actress has been won by the film's star, the immense Michelle Yeoh, who becomes the first Asian actress to win the Oscar.
And that the statuette for best actor rewarded the return of a loser from the 1990s, the brilliant Brendan Fraser who, in
The Whale
, plays an obese introverted character - the very cliché of the comic book reader who loves the multiverse?
In video,
The Whale
with Brendan Fraser, the trailer
