## The Oscar Nomination and the Awards Campaign
When the Academy Award nominations were announced in January 2023, Ke Huy Quan’s name was among them: Best Supporting Actor for *Everything Everywhere All at Once*. He was, at that point in the awards season, widely considered the front-runner for the category. He had swept nearly every precursor award available. His competition included Brendan Gleeson (*The Banshees of Inisherin*), Barry Keoghan (*The Banshees of Inisherin*), Brian Tyree Henry (*Causeway*), and Judd Hirsch (*The Fabelmans*).
The awards campaign is a specific phase of Hollywood’s year — a period of screenings, interviews, trade publication profiles, and the careful management of a film’s presence in the consciousness of Academy voters. Quan’s campaign for *Everything Everywhere All at Once* was conducted with a quality that multiple observers noted: it looked like a man who was genuinely happy to be there rather than one who was performing happiness for strategic reasons.
At various events during the season, he was photographed or described as posing for selfies with Tom Cruise, James Cameron, and Steven Spielberg. He moved through the industry’s formal ceremonies with the combination of gratitude and ease that tends to read well — the person who knows the weight of the moment without being crushed by it.
The film’s overall awards trajectory was extraordinary. *Everything Everywhere All at Once* won seven Academy Awards — the most of any film at the 95th Academy Awards ceremony. It won Best Picture, Best Director (the Daniels), Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh — the first Asian woman to win the award), Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis), Best Supporting Actor (Quan), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. It was a complete sweep of the major categories that no one in the film’s production could have predicted when they were working on it in 2020, separated by a pandemic from the final day of shooting.