All storytelling requires artifice, but last night’s Academy Awards highlighted that movies tend to involve more industrial processing than American cheese. The Best Picture nominees included far-from-realistic spectacles portraying CGI blue people, dimension-hopping laundromat owners, and Tom Cruise flying at Mach 10. The mega-studios Disney and Warner Bros. enjoyed infomercial-like tributes, reminders that Hollywood is a business. Jimmy Kimmel, the ceremony’s host, kept forcing jokes about last year’s infamous slap and the so-called crisis team that was on hand this year to prevent a repeat.

But the best pageantry still makes space for unpredictability—and last night, another artistic medium, music, helped greatly in that effort. Take, for example, the composer M. M. Keeravani. He delivered an acceptance speech for Best Original Song—for “Naatu Naatu” from the Indian blockbuster RRR—that was, itself, a song. “There was only one wish on my mind,” Keeravani crooned to the tune of The Carpenters’s “Top of the World,” inspiring laughter in the audience. “RRR has to win / pride of every Indian / and must put me on the top of the world!”

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As those made-up lyrics suggested, the victory for Keeravani and his collaborator Chandrabose had the air of a fable. A Telugu-language, more-than-three-hour-long action-dramedy, RRR is the sort of global sensation that rarely receives American recognition. “Naatu Naatu” is the first Indian song to be nominated for an Oscar. And as the actress Deepika Padukone said on stage last night, it’s a banger. Blending the thundering of duffs—Indian skin drums—with an electronic pulse, the song holds the energy of a thousand Red Bulls. In RRR, it powers a dance-battle scene that has been viewed millions of times on social media.

The Oscars performance of “Naatu Naatu” translated that gonzo scene to a live setting. While the singers Rahul Sipligunj and Kaala Bhairava delivered the track's joyful Telugu lyrics, two dancers—standing in for RRR's stars N. T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan—executed the signature choreography: a hook step in which one foot hammers the ground while the other shakes in the air, punctuated by suspender-snapping and other flourishes. Wearing pastel-colored dresses and neckties, backup dancers conveyed RRR’s setting for this spectacle: a party thrown by colonial British snoots, upended by two talented interlopers. (Worth noting: Indiewire’s Proma Khosla has raised questions about the authenticity of the segment’s casting.)

The song’s rebellious theme was apt. The other nominees in its category were more typical Academy bait—and were each staged solidly last night. Fourteen-time Oscar nominee Diane Warren played piano as the actress Sofia Carson sang Tell It Like a Woman’s “Applause,” a motivational speech in song form. Rihanna, recently re-awakened to pop stardom, gracefully belted the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ballad “Lift Me Up” while draped in diamonds. The Everything Everywhere All at Once cut “This Is a Life” inspired a whimsical ballet, presided over by a hot-dog-fingered David Byrne, Best Supporting Actress nominee Stephanie Hsu, and a video-screen raccoon.

But the night’s most jolting performance came from the hokiest nominee. Lady Gaga’s “Hold My Hand” from Top Gun: Maverick might as well be called “Grab Your Tissues” for how desperately it bombards the listener in hopes of an emotional response. At the Oscars, however, Gaga played it small. Wearing a black T-shirt while filmed in pore-revealing close-up, she introduced the song with a quiet spiel about how she wrote it in her studio basement. She then took liberties with the melody, emphasizing low moments and little inflections, while alternately clenching her eyes or flashing a moony smile.

This was, in a way, a clichéd TV performance, so determinedly raw that it loops back into seeming unreal. But it was also Gaga doing what she’s great at: finding the unexpected angle and pushing it hard, demonstrating a supernatural commitment to the bit. Moving and ridiculous, the performance—like any great movie—transcended the divide between pageantry and authenticity. In the end, we just want a good show.

There was a moment in the middle of tonight’s Oscar ceremony when I started getting concerned text messages from friends. Their line of inquiry was the same: Was All Quiet on the Western Front about to pull a big upset for Best Picture? The German World War I film, distributed by Netflix, had racked up a slew of technical wins, and a ceremony that had begun with a burst of joyous energy seemed headed in a more fusty, old-fashioned direction. Fear not, I assured every anxious pal: Everything Everywhere All at Once would be winning big.

Indeed, a riotous, baroque sci-fi action film stuffed with martial arts, crude humor, and ruminations on the multiverse dominated the 95th Academy Awards, capturing seven trophies—the most for a Best Picture winner since Slumdog Millionaire in 2009. Everything Everywhere All at Once secured the top prize, capping a wild award season for a film that came out almost a year ago and defied most of the usual formulas for an Oscar campaign. But the movie had built steam off the back of its heartfelt storytelling and box-office success at a time when cinemas were still struggling to rebound from COVID closures. It also made for milestone moments, most notably Michelle Yeoh’s win as Best Actress in a Leading Role, the first Asian performer to win in that category and only the second woman of color.

The first, Halle Berry, handed Yeoh the trophy in a satisfying TV moment that the Oscar producers had likely hoped for when they arranged for Berry to replace Will Smith as a presenter (the prior year’s acting winners traditionally present those categories, but Smith is banned from attending the Oscars for 10 years). In general, the show went smoothly, avoiding the surrealism of 2021’s COVID-impacted, small-scale ceremony, and the dizzying chaos of 2022’s, which was overshadowed by Smith slapping Chris Rock onstage. This year, producers Glenn Weiss and Ricky Kirshner swerved toward traditionalism, bringing back a single host and, unlike last time, airing every award live.

The ensuing ceremony was long, but not unusually so, and the pageantry familiar. Audiences witnessed many hosannas for the power of cinema and the thrill of the collective viewing experience. Jimmy Kimmel, in his third go-round as host, was his reliable self, keeping the patter light with just a couple of acidic jabs; more importantly, he lent a sense of structure that the past few years sorely lacked. Though Kimmel’s monologue lamented the absence of Tom Cruise (his film Top Gun: Maverick was a Best Picture nominee, but he’s reportedly busy filming), Everything Everywhere quickly emerged as the story of the night—no surprise given how it swept the precursor film awards.

The evening started off with two major wins for the movie: The endlessly gleeful and open-hearted Ke Huy Quan, a former child star who had mostly retired from acting in the early ’90s due to lack of opportunity, won Best Supporting Actor and gave a joyous speech. His co-star Jamie Lee Curtis, industry royalty who had only received her first nomination this year, followed by winning Best Supporting Actress.

[Read: A tale of two Oscar wins]

But then the ceremony bounced between technical awards, song performances, and montages (including a particularly egregious bit of spon-con for Disney’s upcoming Little Mermaid remake), and the energy began to dwindle. All Quiet on the Western Front won four awards, mostly in categories that Everything Everywhere wasn’t competing in, conveying the impression of momentum for a bleak work with a familiar title (another All Quiet won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1931). But just as my interest was flagging, things picked back up, partly thanks to song performances from Lady Gaga (singing “Hold My Hand” from Top Gun) and Kaala Bhairava and Rahul Sipligunj (performing RRR’s “Naatu Naatu”).

RRR won for Best Song, the first Indian film to do so, and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking mildly surprised All Quiet in the Adapted Screenplay category. Then it was a buzzy rush to the end, with Everything Everywhere winning for Directing (going to Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan), Lead Actress, and Picture, after also picking up the Original Screenplay award. The Whale was the only other multiple winner of the night, collecting a makeup and hairstyling award along with a Lead Actor trophy for Brendan Fraser, who seemed deeply overwhelmed by the moment. His was another comeback story following years in the Hollywood wilderness, and the crowd’s enthusiasm was palpable.

The strangeness of Everything Everywhere’s march to victory has been much-remarked upon already. Its March 2022 premiere makes it the earliest-in-the-year release to win Best Picture since The Silence of the Lambs in 1992, bucking the idea that a movie has to come out in the fall or later to get Oscar attention. It is a dense and challenging bit of genre storytelling for an awards body that has long been resistant to handing major trophies to such works. And it’s a breakthrough for Asian and Asian American performers, who have been under-recognized throughout Oscar history. But the Academy Awards reflect how the industry changes, even if the speed with which it happens can feel painfully slow, and the sight of Yeoh, Quan, and the Daniels collecting their trophies was a clear sign of a thunderous, triumphant shift.