'Everything Everywhere All at Once' Is Not All That

It just isn't...

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Caution: some spoilers ahead.

The Oscars are on Sunday, and if there’s one thing that seems like a near-certainty, it’s that Everything Everywhere All at Once is going home with the Best Picture award.

The movie’s title could basically double as a description of the awards that it’s hoovering up. On Sunday, Everything Everywhere won the top prize at the Writers Guild Awards (which, full disclosure, I voted in as a Guild member). As the New York Times reported, this makes it just the fifth movie ever to get the top prize from all four Hollywood industry guilds. The other four all then won—you guessed it—Best Picture at the Oscars.

So, barring a monumental upset (which can happen, I am leaving room for it to happen, don’t come and tell me how wrong I was if it happens because I said it could happen!!!), the suspense on Sunday will not be whether Everything Everywhere wins big, but rather how many Oscars it takes home. That’s gotta be making the folks over at Oscars, Inc. very, very happy, because, unlike many of the most recent winners, Everything Everywhere is the platonic ideal of a Best Picture winner: financially successful, critically acclaimed, potentially history-making, filled with actors you want to root for, and, most of all, adored beyond measure by millions of people who might tune into the show to watch their new favorite movie of all time crush the competition,

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’ll be hoping that almost all the actors in Everything Everywhere win on Sunday. I stan Michelle Yeoh as much as the next person. And I think that it will be really cool to see a bunch of Asian and Asian American stars getting recognition from Hollywood for virtually the first time, like, ever. So I definitely understand the love for this movie on that level.

However, what I do not understand is the extent of the love for this movie as a movie. And what I really don’t get is the way that people are going all in for Everything Everywhere like it is one of the best things that has ever existed in the history of human civilization. Because, to me, it just…isn’t.

Now, before you come to my house with pitchforks, just hear me out for one second.