Best Director Oscar goes to ‘Everywhere’ Daniels duo

Angel – The Daniels go the extra mile on everything. It paid off in one of the most unlikely Best Director Oscars in history.

The directing duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert won an Elite Filmmaking Award Sunday night for their multi-movie drama. everything is everywheretopping a field of talent that includes Hollywood royalty Steven Spielberg.

The Daniels were Oscar favorites on the night, with 11 nominations for their film for best, Huge awards season momentumlet the victory come as no surprise.

It was the duo’s second Oscar of the night, having earlier won best original screenplay, one of five statuettes their film won on Sunday night, including best supporting actor Ke Huiquan and best supporting actress Jamie Lee Curtis. It will probably still win Best Actress and Best Picture.

When they won an earlier Oscar, Scheinert slammed the names of his favorite school teachers, saying: “You all inspire me and teach me not to look like a fool.”

“My imposter syndrome is at an all-time high,” Kwan said. He called Scheinert “my confidence. Before I believed, he was telling me I was a storyteller.”

At 35 each, Daniels is the youngest and least experienced filmmaker in a group of nominees that also includes the 76-year-old Spielberg (“The Fabelmans”), Ruben Östlund (“The Triangle of Sadness”), 48, Todd Field (“Tár”), 59, and Martin McDonagh, 52 (“The Banshee of Inisherin”).

Their victory came almost a year after the film’s release. Daniels’ only previous feature was the bizarre corpse comedy “Swiss Army Man.” At the time it seemed like a pipe dream that such a pair would win an award that star directors from Alfred Hitchcock to Ridley Scott to Quentin Tarantino had failed to win.

But “Ubiquitous,” mixing the same bizarre elements with elements of Hollywood sci-fi and action epics, was an instant hit — and meme-inspiring — and has become an awards magnet in recent months .

Kwan became the third Asian-American to win the director Oscar. Cho Chloe and Bong Joon also won awards.The film was a boon to the Asian cast who played most of the main roles, including Michelle Yeoh, stephanie xu and Ke HuiquanThey’ve both been nominated for Oscars, with Kwon Seung-young still to be awarded in the Best Actress category.

Daniels is the third directorial duo to win an Oscar. Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise won in 1962 for their original “West Side Story,” and brothers Joel and Ethan Coen won in 2008 for “No Country for Old Men.” ” won the award.

They are also among the youngest recipients. In 2017, “La La Land” director Damien Chazelle was the youngest director, only 32 years old.

last month they won Directors Guild of America Awardwhich has proven to be a strong predictor of Oscar wins.

Spielberg had been expected to make it through awards season with his autobiographical “The Fabelmans,” but then a surge in love for “All at the Same Time” proved too much.

Scheinert, of Birmingham, Alabama, and Kwan of Westboro, Massachusetts, met while studying film at Emerson College in Boston.

They started their careers making music videos before moving on to feature films and occasionally directing TV episodes.

There are no female directors nominated in this category. After two years of bucking the trend, with women winning back-to-back wins in the category, the academy reverted to its historic norm of nominating only male directors.

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Follow Associated Press entertainment writer Andrew Dalton on Twitter: https://twitter.com/andyjamesdalton

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