Before Oscars, ‘Everything Everywhere’ Sweeps Spirit Awards

Jamie Lee Curtis, Michelle Yeoh, Dan Kwan, Stephanie Hsu, Jonathan Wang, Daniel Scheinert and Ke Huy Quan winners of the Best Feature award for "Everything Everywhere All at Once" pose in the press room during the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, US, March 4, 2023. (Reuters)
Jamie Lee Curtis, Michelle Yeoh, Dan Kwan, Stephanie Hsu, Jonathan Wang, Daniel Scheinert and Ke Huy Quan winners of the Best Feature award for "Everything Everywhere All at Once" pose in the press room during the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, US, March 4, 2023. (Reuters)
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Before Oscars, ‘Everything Everywhere’ Sweeps Spirit Awards

Jamie Lee Curtis, Michelle Yeoh, Dan Kwan, Stephanie Hsu, Jonathan Wang, Daniel Scheinert and Ke Huy Quan winners of the Best Feature award for "Everything Everywhere All at Once" pose in the press room during the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, US, March 4, 2023. (Reuters)
Jamie Lee Curtis, Michelle Yeoh, Dan Kwan, Stephanie Hsu, Jonathan Wang, Daniel Scheinert and Ke Huy Quan winners of the Best Feature award for "Everything Everywhere All at Once" pose in the press room during the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, US, March 4, 2023. (Reuters)

"Everything Everywhere All At Once" continued its awards sweep at the Film Independent Spirit Awards on its path to the Oscars next weekend. The multiverse-hopping adventure collected awards for best picture, directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, actors Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu, screenplay and editing.

"Thank you to everyone who makes crazy, weird independent movies," Scheinert said.

Awards were handed out Saturday afternoon in a tent on the beach in Santa Monica, Calif., and the show was streamed live on YouTube and Twitter.

First-time Spirit Awards host Hasan Minhaj opened the show saying, "Of all the awards shows, this is by far, one of them."

Minhaj went hard on everything, from the entertainment trade website Deadline ("At this point, Deadline is half gossip, half Ezra Miller crime tracker," he said) to the show’s lack of a broadcast partner.

"The Independent Film Channel did not want the Independent Film Awards," he said, noting that the channel chose to show the poorly reviewed Will Ferrell movie "Semi-Pro" instead.

"Awards shows are dead," he added. "My 2-year-old watches slime videos with more viewers than the Oscars."

The first prize of the afternoon went to Quan for best supporting actor for "Everything Everywhere All At Once," which his co-star Jamie Lee Curtis was also nominated for. This is the first year the Spirit Awards embraced gender neutral acting awards – both lead and supporting performance categories had 10 nominees. Quan, who is expected to win the supporting actor Oscar next week, chose to devote his speech to many of the crew who worked on the film, from the stunt coordinators to the production assistants.

Hsu later collected the prize for best breakthrough performance for the film.

"This is my first ever individual award and it feels incredibly appropriate that it’s in this room. I feel so honored" she said. "I really want to thank the Daniels so much. Thank you so much for finding me and believing in my art and seeing me and championing me."

Laura Poitras’s "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" won best documentary. The film looks at the life of photographer and activist Nan Goldin.

"It would take me the entire day to fully express my gratitude to Nan for her collaboration and for her trust," Poitras said. "She’s taught me so many things in making this film, most importantly the role of art and artists to change not only society but how we understand the world we live in."

"Women Talking" was previously announced as winner of the Robert Altman Award, celebrating director Sarah Polley, casting directors John Buchan and Jason Knight, and the ensemble cast including Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand.

"It’s so fitting the way that you’re being recognized for the beautiful, supportive, loving ensemble that you are," Polley said.

She also called her film "Women Are Talking" in a nod to Mark Wahlberg’s slip-up at the Screen Actors Guild Award s last week.

"Sorry, Marky Mark just gets in my head," she said.

Apple TV+’s "Pachinko" got the corresponding award on the television side.

Nathan Fielder had the crowd laughing accepting his award for non-scripted series for his HBO show "The Rehearsal" and detailing the contents of the lunch boxes at everyone’s seats.

"The bean salad was great," he said. "There were a few grapes also. Delicious. They weren’t rotten. None were rotten."

Looking down at his award, he said, "I guess they’ll add the name to it later?"

"Nanny" director Nikyatu Jusu won the Someone to Watch award.

"Thank God Charlotte Wells was not in this category because all year ‘Aftersun’ has been whooping my ass," Jusu said.

"Aftersun" did win best first feature later in the afternoon.

"Here’s to the second feature," Wells said.

Other winners included "Joyland" (best international film), "The Bear" (new scripted series and supporting actor Ayo Edebiri), "The Cathedral" (The John Cassavetes Award), John Patton Ford (first screenplay for "Emily the Criminal") and "Tár" cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister.

Winners are voted on by members of the non-profit organization Film Independent. The budget cap for eligible films was recently raised from $22.5 million to $30 million.

Kwan closed the show with some words of inspiration to dream big.

"We are in the middle of an identity crisis, the industry at large is confused as to what’s happening next and it’s really scary especially for the independent world, but I want to offer up a reframe: This is an opportunity," Kwan said.

"When things are shaking and it gets turbulent and cracks form in the foundation, that’s the best time to plant seeds. It is our job not just to adapt to the future but also to actively dream up what kind of future we want to rewrite and what kind of future we want to be working and living in," Kwan continued. "I urge us all to dream really big. What we do here is going to flow upstream to the rest of the industry."



When Did Disney Villains Stop Being So Villainous? New Show Suggests They May Just Be Misunderstood

An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)
An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)
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When Did Disney Villains Stop Being So Villainous? New Show Suggests They May Just Be Misunderstood

An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)
An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)

Cruella de Vil wanted to turn Dalmatian puppies into fur coats, Captain Hook tried to bomb Peter Pan and Maleficent issued a curse of early death for Aurora.

But wait, maybe these Disney villains were just misunderstood? That's the premise of a new musical show at Walt Disney World that has some people wondering: When did Disney's villains stop wanting to be so ... villainous?

The live show, "Disney Villains: Unfairly Ever After," debuts May 27 at Disney's Hollywood Studios park at the Orlando, Florida, resort. In the show, the three baddies of old-school Disney movies plead their cases before an audience that they are the most misunderstood villains of them all.

"We wanted to tell a story that's a little different than what's been told before: Which one of them has been treated the most unfairly ever after?" Mark Renfrow, a creative director of the show, said in a promotional video.

That hook - the narrative kind, not the captain - is scratching some Disney observers the wrong way.

"I think it's wonderful when you still have stories where villains are purely villainous," said Benjamin Murphy, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Florida State University's campus in Panama. "When you have villains reveling in their evil, it can be amusing and satisfying."

Disney has some precedent for putting villains in a sympathetic light, or at least explaining how they got to be so evil. The 2021 film, "Cruella," for instance, presents a backstory for the dog-hater played by actor Emma Stone that blames her villainy on her birth mother never wanting her.

Other veins of pop culture have rethought villains too, perhaps none more famously than the book, theatrical musical and movie versions of "Wicked," the reinterpretation of the Wicked Witch of the West character from "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."

The blockbuster success of "Wicked, " which was based on the 1995 novel "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West," sparked the trend of rethinking villains in popular entertainment, Murphy said.

"With trends like that, the formula is repeated and repeated until it's very predictable: Take a villain and make them sympathetic," he said.

The centuries-old fairy tales upon which several Disney movies are based historically were meant to teach children a lesson, whether it was not to get close to wolves (Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs) or trust strange, old women in the woods (Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel).

But they often made marginalized people into villains - older women, people of color or those on the lower socioeconomic scale, said Rebecca Rowe, an assistant professor of children's literature at Texas A&M University-Commerce.

The trend toward making villains more sympathetic started in the late 1980s and 1990s as children's media took off. There was a desire to present villains in a manner that was more complicated and less black and white, as there was an overall cultural push toward emphasizing acceptance, she said.

"The problem is everyone has swung so hard into that message, that we have kind of lost the villainous villains," Rowe said. "There is value in the villainous villains. There are people who just do evil things. Sometimes there is a reason for it, but sometimes not. Just because there is a reason doesn't mean it negates the harm."

Whether it's good for children to identify with villains is complicated. There is a chance they adopt the villains' traits if it's what they identify with, but then some scholars believe it's not a bad thing for children to empathize with characters who often are part of marginalized communities, Rowe said.

The Disney villains also tend to appeal to adults more than children. They also appreciate the villains' campiness, with some "Disney princesses" gladly graduating into "evil queens."

Erik Paul, an Orlando resident who has had a year-round pass to Disney World for the past decade, isn't particularly fond of the villains, but understands why Disney would want to frame them in a more sympathetic light in a show dedicated just to them.

"I know friends who go to Hollywood Studios mainly to see the villain-related activities," Paul said. "Maybe that's why people like the villains because they feel misunderstood as well, and they feel a kinship to the villains."