Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert won the best director Oscar for their poignant, warmhearted multiverse mash-up, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” on Sunday night, making them the rare set of paired directors to win the big prize.
Academy officials said they were just the fifth set of director duos to be nominated. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins won for “West Side Story” (1961) and the Coen brothers won for “No Country for Old Men” (2007), though they later lost for “True Grit” (2010). Warren Beatty and Buck Henry also received a nod but not a statuette, for the 1978 comedy “Heaven Can Wait.”
“Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which premiered last April, was a hit with audiences and critics alike. Although the Daniels gleefully incorporate hot-dog fingers and everything bagels into their head-spinning, world-jumping movie, which they also wrote, the film is, at its core, about family and its many complications. It stars Michelle Yeoh as a laundromat owner at odds with everyone from the I.R.S. to her loving husband and rebellious daughter.
The Daniels, as they are collectively known, came into the night as heavy favorites. Sunday’s win adds another honor to an impressive awards-season run for the Daniels, who also took top prizes at the Directors Guild Awards and the Critics Choice Awards.
Both of the Daniels used their stage time to thank their parents.
“Thank you for not squashing my creativity when I was making really disturbing horror films or really perverted comedy films or dressing in drag as a kid, which is a threat to nobody,” Scheinert said.
“We are all products of our context. We are all descendants of something and someone. And I want to acknowledge my context,” Kwan added. “My immigrant parents, my father who fell in love with movies because he needed to escape the world and thus passed that love of movies onto me. My mother, who was a creative soul, who wanted to be a dancer, an actor and singer, but could not afford the luxury of that life path, and then gave it to me. My incredible brothers and sisters, who helped me survive the chaos of childhood.”
