Why One Battle After Another Won Best Picture

I am not the kind of Oscars pundit who makes knee-jerk predictions, so it was all the more surprising, an hour into my first viewing of One Battle After Another, that I had a realization: This movie is going to win Best Picture.

This was not a case of festival fever. It was early September, and most of the critical Establishment had already decamped to TIFF — Indiewire’s David Ehrlich showed up to the screening with a roller bag on his way to the airport  — so the theater was less than a quarter full. And it was not a case of being influenced by those around me. In the seat next to mine was a buddy who’s a Paul Thomas Anderson fanatic. He liked the movie, he said, but didn’t think it lived up to the heights of PTA’s more ambitious efforts like The Master. (The movie has since risen in his estimation.)

So why was I so sure at this early date that OBAA had it in the bag? I began writing a post planting my flag, but then other plans got in the way. Still I got the basic thrust of my thinking down on Letterboxd, and once I returned to work I never wavered in the sense that PTA’s film had it in the bag. Not when Hamnet won the Best Drama Globe, not when Sinners broke the record for most nominations by a single film, and not even when the Sinners cast won a surprise SAG trophy and pundits everywhere started talking about a “vibe shift.” For perhaps the first time in my life, my initial judgement proved correct: OBAA won six of the 13 awards it was up for, including a trifecta for PTA in Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture.

Light the candle, put the lock upon the door, and let me do the dirty work of explaining why OBAA became an Oscars juggernaut — for some reasons that were apparent on that September afternoon and for others that only became clear as the season wore on.

It Presciently Nailed the Vibe of Trump 2.0.

Here’s what I would have written had I not entered my Bob Ferguson era earlier than expected. What Get Out did for the first Trump era, One Battle did for its deranged sequel — capture elements of a Zeit that hadn’t yet Geisted when the film was shot. This was evident on a pure surface level as multiple moments from the film anticipated the defining imagery of the second Trump era. A government goon squad terrorizing an American city, declaring war on immigrants and citizens alike. The terrifying blankness of James Raterman’s military interrogator. An underground resistance network powered by community ties and lo-fi technology. But it was equally true that, in his gonzo mock-Pynchonian way, Anderson had excavated the psychological subtext of Trumpism. The leathery, oddly jacked old men who make their gender hangups everyone else’s problem. A ruling elite whose utter ridiculousness exists alongside an ideology that’s indistinguishable from Nazism. Even throwaway lines about the “Bedford Forrest Medal of Honor” foreshadowed official efforts to rehabilitate the heroes of the Confederacy. All this gave OBAA a lightning-in-a-bottle quality that was potent enough to power the film through to the end of the season.

It Could Be Everything to Everyone.

These are not easy times for the films we might have once called “Oscar bait.” A straightforward period piece like Hamnet can be nominated all over the ballot, and even win an acting trophy, but the modern Academy prefers a more chimerical quality in its Best Picture winners. Like previous winners Everything Everywhere All at Once and Anora, OBAA was an Oscars shape-shifter capable of embodying multiple narratives at the same time. The political lane was locked down from the jump as was the comedy lane. But any hopes Team Hamnet might have had of riding to victory as the emotional choice got edged out by the fact that OBAA had a foot in the heart lane too. Anderson often emphasized he saw the film as a simple story of a father trying to save his daughter. (More on this below.)

It Was Just Enough of a Hit.

Similarly, the argument for Sinners went that it was the populist, small-d democratic pick in the race. This might have been a coup de grâce had OBAA been an art film on the level of Anora or The Brutalist. But while its box office paled in comparison to Sinners — at least domestically; their worldwide numbers were closer — you could not argue One Battle was a niche project that only a tiny elite had seen. The film ended its run at $72 million domestic, roughly on par with EEAOO, whose own awards narrative positioned it as a breakout hit. Skeptics pointed out that, given the film’s exorbitant budget, it was still a money loser, but that wasn’t really germane to the question of its overall popularity. Besides, one reason the film cost so much was that it was largely shot in California. At a time when so many other productions have fled town, who in Hollywood would complain about that?

It Had Indelible Performances.

In its opening sequence, OBAA introduces two instantly iconic characters: Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills and Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw. Both have proven polarizing in their own ways — for Perfidia, it’s the character people take issue with; with Penn, it’s the up-to-11 performance — but they are clearly big, Oscar-friendly roles, mixing coiled rage with a flinty vulnerability. I confess, I didn’t see Benicio del Toro’s quieter performance as Sensei Sergio St. Carlos making as big of a splash during tastemaker season as it did. (But that’s because I didn’t yet know what people in the future knew: how much of a hand del Toro had in creatively shaping the character’s plotline.) Throw in Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar comeback after missing for Don’t Look Up and Killers of the Flower Moon, and OBAA scored four acting nominations, just as many as the much-ballyhoo’d Sentimental Value. (Unlike Joachim Trier’s film, OBAA did miss an acting nom it was hoping for — Chase Infiniti in Best Actress — but that seemed to have been an issue of category confusion.) Given that actors remain the largest branch of the Academy, locking down the support ensured a solid floor at Oscars time, especially once Penn’s RFK Jr.–esque transformation swept the industry precursors ahead of winning a third career Oscar in absentia, proof of just how crazy the industry went for Col. Lockjaw.

It Had a Wide Base of Support Across the Industry.

But it wasn’t just actors. In fact, SAG was one of the only industry bodies that didn’t give One Battle their main prize. Above-the-line guilds like the DGA, PGA, and WGA; craft guilds like ACE and the ASC; even unexpected bodies like the Costume Designers Guild all tipped for One Battle. PTA’s film also won Best Picture at BAFTA and Best International Film at France’s Césars, a sign of strong support from (say it with me) the ever-more-influential overseas contingent. On a preferential ballot where consensus outweighs passion, such widespread support was crucial.

The Campaign Let the Movie Do the Talking.

One critique that popped up around One Battle had to do with the campaign’s strenuous avoidance of saying anything political. Despite the film kicking off with a scene in which leftist militants liberate a camp full of immigrants, cast and crew largely eschewed mentioning specific real-world issues in favor of giving wan quotes about “divisiveness.” To some observers, this seemed disingenuous, a case of the film trying to have its cake and eat it, too. OBAA had cruised to pole position on the basis of its political themes only to cast them aside whenever they weren’t convenient. This was an eminently reasonable point. However! After seeing what happened to Timothée Chalamet over the past two weeks, OBAA’s strategy of tamping down on any off-the-cuff remarks that could have set off a political firestorm suddenly looks a lot more prudent.

It Was PTA’s Time.

Ultimately, all of these explanations paled in comparison to the big one. Anderson came into the season widely regarded as the best American director never to win an Oscar, and the industry collectively decided it was time. The notion of how and when it becomes someone’s time is a mercurial thing often involving a lot of pain and a few false starts. (At first, Dunkirk looked like it was going to be Chris Nolan’s “time”; it became clear only in retrospect that he had to wait until Oppenheimer.) At some point in the future, it will be Coogler’s time. At another point, even further in the future, it might even be Timothée Chalamet’s time. But after nine films and 11 Oscar losses, Hollywood’s collective unconscious decided it was PTA’s time, and once that train gets rolling, there’s nothing — not vampires, not ping-pong players, and not Shakespeare himself — that can stop it.