This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNWC 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 Yo is nominated for Best Actress Playing Evelyn, the hapless owner of a laundromat.

Stephanie Shoe 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 nemices.

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.

Every time you look at your phone, you're reminded by nightmare social media of the nightmare

situation in Ukraine and the housing crisis and the unending pandemic and just just

...