This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Oscars will be given out soon, and among the Best Picture nominees, and there are a lot of them, is the film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

And in many ways, it seems the most surprising film, and it's considered a real frontrunner.

It's not an earnest drama, a magnificent spectacle, or a beloved nostalgia remake.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is really a genre unto itself, a loopy science fiction quest that somehow evolves into a martial

arts revenge battle, and it's crossed with a sentimental family drama of a mother and a daughter

trying to understand each other. Michelle Yeo is nominated for best actress playing Evelyn,

the hapless owner of a laundromat. Stephanie Shue is nominated for best actress playing Evelyn, the hapless owner of a laundromat.

Stephanie Shue is nominated for supporting actress playing her depressed daughter Joy,

and is also the film's deranged supervillain, Jobu.

The relationship between Evelyn and Joy, in its simplest terms, is very fraught.

It is a story of a relationship of a daughter who's a lesbian, who is deeply longing for her mother's acceptance.

But they keep chasing each other around in the universe and they can just never find one another until, of course,

they launch into the multiverse and become nemeses.

Stephanie Shoe spoke last spring just after the movie came out with Gia Tolentino, a staff

writer at The New Yorker.

So much about the world seems just extremely overwhelming and bad and broken.

You know, every time you look at your phone, you were reminded by nightmare social media of the nightmare situation in Ukraine and the housing crisis and the unending pandemic and just sort of injustice wherever you look, right?

And we all feel this all the time.

But one of the things that people have responded to so strongly in

everything everywhere is that the movie seems to sketch out some sort of standpoint about how to

live in a world that is overwhelming and bad and broken, right? How to value that world and love

...