The Daniels

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert met at Emerson College and spent the early 2010s making the most physically inventive videos of the era — everything practical, everything committed, everything slightly too far.

'Houdini' has Foster the People puppeteered by their own corpses. 'Simple Song' turns a house move into an escalating family brawl. 'Turn Down for What' is the purest statement of the method: a literal reading of the lyric in which bodies burst through floors and pelvises destroy an entire house. It took the VMA for Best Direction.

The leap to features surprised nobody who had watched the videos. Everything Everywhere All at Once won seven Academy Awards in 2023, including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for the pair — the same maximalist logic, finally given two hours.