‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and ‘Everything Everywhere’: Sometimes the Oscar Season Game Changer Is Beaten by the Game

variety.com:

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of Content There’s a film in the Oscar best picture race that has younger Academy voters and a new generation of film critics excited, while their older peers in both camps appear more what one might call agitated.

It’s a fairly neat generational split. The film’s anarchic spirit and unorthodox mix of genre filmmaking and biting social commentary is seen as daring and refreshing by its young fans, while its older detractors are scratching their heads over weird tonal shifts, from comic and rollicking one minute, serious and reflective in the next, shifting from spoofing genre tropes to questioning of societal norms.

The year is 1968 and the film is Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde.”   But you’d be forgiven if you found the paragraphs above an apt description of this year’s Producers Guild Awards best feature winner, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”  Just as “Bonnie” was a landmark film in Academy history, causing massive gnashing of teeth over its real value and meaning as a watershed in both its graphic ultra-violence and its unconventional take on the standard-issue cops-and-robbers pictures that Hollywood had been routinely manufacturing for decades, “Everything” has skeptics tut-tutting about how magic bagel portals and hot dog fingers got into the Oscar race in the first place.

With “Clyde,” it was an off-kilter mix of antic banjo-orchestrated car chases that the film’s lovers saw as meta before meta was a thing.