Can Everything Everywhere All at Once Make Acting Oscar History?

A Streetcar Named Desire and Network have stood tall for almost a half century at this point with a strange distinction.  Both of these films won three acting Oscars...while neither of them won the top prize of the year.  This distinction is made weirder by the fact that no other films have ever won three competitive acting trophies, and as a result, to date, no film has ever won both three acting trophies and Best Picture in the same year.

The SAG Awards this past week put into the realm of possibility that this could change.  While victories for Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh were expected (or at least, didn't raise eyebrows), a shock victory by Jamie Lee Curtis in the Supporting Actress category threw the entire race for Best Supporting Actress off.  What was initially expected to be a steamroll by Angela Bassett in the category has turned into a three-way race, featuring Bassett, Curtis, and BAFTA winner Kerry Condon.  This begs the question-if Curtis can repeat at the Oscars (very plausible), are we in for a situation where Streetcar and Network get some company...and could Everything Everywhere All at Once (this is a lot to type, so we'll use EEAAO as shorthand the remainder of this article) become the first film in Oscar history to win all three acting trophies AND take Best Picture?

It's worth taking a look at the history here, because as you can imagine, it's not super common for a film to win even two acting trophies.  In Oscar history, only 39 films have won two acting trophies.  Every single one of these films were nominated for Best Picture, so while films have been nominated in three acting categories before without a nomination for Best Picture (examples include Only When I Laugh and Iris), in terms of actual wins, you need a Best Picture citation.

Let's first look at the prospect of winning a third trophy before we add in the bonus of EEAAO potentially also becoming the first film to do so with a Best Picture win.  Of the 37 films that won two trophies, 18 of them were not nominated in an additional acting category.  While technically some of these conceivably could have won in a tie, as five of the films (Going My Way, Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, The Fighter, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) were nominated twice in at least one of the categories they won, that's not really plausible, so in reality only 21 films were really eligible to win three acting trophies that made it past the third leg (which only Network and Streetcar cleared).

These nineteen films run the gamut.  Four of them (Coming Home, Mrs. Miniver, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and From Here to Eternity) were nominated in all four categories, increasing their chances.  Others of them have nominations that they almost certainly wouldn't have won.  As someone who lived through the 1998 Oscars, for example, Geoffrey Rush was nowhere close to winning a trophy for Shakespeare in Love.  Still, there are films on this list, thinking specifically of a movie like Hud where the missing nominee (in this case, Paul Newman) was very close to a win, and could've added to the count.

For EEAAO, you could argue the weakest link in their prize is not, like Network or Streetcar (both of which, it's worth noting were also nominated in all four categories-so a full sweep was theoretically on the table, something that is not an option for EEAAO which is not up for Best Actor) for Best Picture, but instead for Best Supporting Actress.  In terms of getting a full "grand slam" here (three acting trophies & a Best Picture win), Network and Streetcar aren't the only two films to have completed three legs of this race but come up short.  Nine films have won Best Picture, two acting trophies, and were nominated in at least one more acting category without winning it.  These films include One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, All the King's Men, On the Waterfront, Kramer vs. Kramer, Million Dollar Baby, Mrs. Miniver, Gone with the Wind, Shakespeare in Love, and From Here to Eternity.

In terms of which movie got the closest, you can rule out a number of films pretty quickly.  Streetcar was not a frontrunner for Best Picture (it was actually expected to sweep the acting trophies but the Best Picture frontrunner was A Place in the Sun, which also lost), and honestly Network was a shock win for Supporting Actress as it was (the smart money was on Jane Alexander or Jodie Foster), and Rocky seemed to have the awards locked up.  Some of the other contenders (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, All the King's Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, Shakespeare in Love, On the Waterfront, Million Dollar Baby, From Here to Eternity) were not at all favorites to win the their third acting trophies.  

That leaves Mrs. Miniver and Gone with the Wind as arguably the only two films that have gotten as close as EEAAO currently is to this distinction.  Miniver had nominations for Best Actor & Supporting Actor, the latter of which was arguably its best shot (the winner was a stunned Van Heflin, besting Miniver's Henry Travers).  Gone with the Wind had an actual frontrunner in Clark Gable, who ended up losing to Robert Donat, and while Thomas Mitchell won for Stagecoach in Supporting Actor, you could make a serious argument that he won in part for playing Scarlett O'Hara's father in Gone with the Wind.  This is some hallowed ground that EEAAO is treading here (Gone with the Wind at this point is basic shorthand for Hollywood movies), but the film is arguably the closest we've gotten to having a movie pull off this hat trick since the 1940's.