That evidence has a particular weight in the context of what the Venice ovation was celebrating. One of the things the audience was applauding was a person they had liked — not just a performer they had admired, but a person they had found genuinely warm and decent through the medium of his public presence over thirty years. Johnson’s tribute was one of many pieces of external confirmation that the warmth was real, that the decency was genuine, that the person who appeared to be likable in his public appearances actually was.
In the specific context of an industry that has not always been kind to the people who are kind within it, this confirmation mattered.
## The Multiverse and What He Meant
The multiverse line — “So this is what the multiverse looks like!” — was the opening of Brendan Fraser’s Oscar acceptance speech, and it deserves the analysis it has rarely received.
The multiverse, in its 2023 cultural context, referred primarily to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s exploration of alternate timelines and parallel realities, and more specifically to Everything Everywhere All at Once, the film that would win Best Picture that same evening. The concept had saturated popular culture to a degree that made it available as a reference point even in a speech about something else entirely.
But Fraser was not primarily making a Marvel joke. He was saying something true: that standing at the Oscar podium, on that night, looking out at that audience, felt like a reality he could not have predicted from within any of the realities he had inhabited during the previous thirty years. The multiverse line is an acknowledgment of improbability — not false modesty, but genuine recognition that the specific configuration of events that had produced this moment was not the configuration he had been able to see coming.