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This summer came and went with decidedly few awards contenders, especially compared to the last few years’ yield of summer Oscar fare like Oppenheimer, Barbie, Top Gun: Maverick, and Elvis. Sinners established its case for Oscar consideration back in April, but since then, anything with a pedigree — be it Celine Song’s Materialists or the TIFF People’s Choice award winner The Life of Chuck — revealed itself to be a nonstarter in the awards conversation.
Into this relative void steps Paul Thomas Anderson, whose films have been nominated for 28 Academy Awards over the course of his career. His latest, One Battle After Another, is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland, and was described half-jokingly by the director during a post-screening Q&A on Monday as “an action-comedy with a dash of postpartum depression.” The film, which stars Oscar winners Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro, and Sean Penn, alongside Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, and Regina Hall, has been enjoying an incredibly effusive reception from critics. It holds a score of 96/100 on the review aggregator Metacritic, making it the best-reviewed film of 2025 (tied with Julia Loktev’s documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow.) Headlines have touted the film as a masterpiece, a triumph, and a wonder. Our own Alison Willmore ranks it as top-tier PTA, and I’m inclined to agree.
So: An Academy-favored filmmaker has a new film starring a bunch of Oscar winners, and it’s burning up review pages in a year where Oscar front-runners have been hard to come by. This isn’t advanced calculus. One Battle After Another is our new Best Picture front-runner. Right? Well, aside from a general reticence to hand out trophies in September, I’d point out that a number of questions and caveats need to be answered on the road from here to the Oscar podium.
On the Subject of Revolution
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: An Oscar winner in Best Picture needs a hook; preferably more than one. “Just give the award to the best movie” sounds like an incredibly simple task until you ask as many as two people what they think the best movie is. “Paul Thomas Anderson is due” could be a great hook — look how well it worked for Christopher Nolan just two years ago. But the trickiest needle to thread will be how the Warner Bros. team behind One Battle After Another is going to market the movie in relation to the terrifying state of events in the U.S. The film blends eras and references as it follows the members of an anti-fascist group called the French 75, including Bob (DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Taylor), as they carry out 1960s-style guerrilla attacks on 2020s-style immigrant-detention centers. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is represented alternately by macho-psychotic military types like Sean Penn’s Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw and an executive regime looking to racially purify the country. This should all sound familiar. If you haven’t noticed, things are pretty intense out there, with the Trump administration pushing things farther and farther toward authoritarian fascism and activists on the ground actively resisting ICE raids, and that was all before the killing of Charlie Kirk lit the fuse on MAGA promises to crush the left. With One Battle After Another presenting fascist raids on sanctuary cities and the French 75 presenting as the kind of terrorist outfit Trump claims Antifa is, it’s a safe bet that the film will be touching a few raw nerves.
What Anderson is saying about this moment, however, is bound to be an open question. Does PTA support armed revolution? What does it mean when he undercuts that revolution with comedy? Are the villains depicted too broadly? Based on the Q&A after Monday’s screening — which gathered Anderson, DiCaprio, del Toro, Taylor, and Infiniti — the answers may ultimately be left to us. Anderson replied to one question about current events by saying that “details of the world become unplayable” when making a film, choosing instead to focus on things like character motivation and heart. DiCaprio at least twice referenced the “polarization” in the current climate but went no further, for now. That said, if the filmmakers choose to let One Battle After Another speak for itself, I think it speaks rather loudly against white-supremacist fascism, while not shying away from the costs of “doing the revolution,” as DiCaprio’s character at one point says.
All that said, how far One Battle After Another can take its message about our political reality will likely be up to the awards voters themselves. The last few weeks have had many in the mainstream media and general public calling to tone down the rhetoric, and you have to wonder if a pervasive wish to de-escalate could move some skittish voters away from a film that depicts active violent resistance.
Does Sean Penn Have Supporting Actor on Lock(… jaw)?
Regardless of how current events end up impacting One Battle’s awards chances, it feels certain that several cast members are going to wind up in the mix for nominations. DiCaprio enters a Best Actor race that isn’t uncrowded, competing with the likes of Michael B. Jordan (Sinners), George Clooney (Jay Kelly), Jeremy Allen White (Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere), Dwayne Johnson (The Smashing Machine), and Timothée Chalamet (Marty Supreme). After winning the Oscar for The Revenant in 2016, DiCaprio has only been nominated once more, for 2019’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. That justly lauded performance holds similar DNA to what he’s doing in One Battle, with a performance that pivots freely from paranoid buffoonery to dialed-in emotion. The lead performance in the Best Picture winner has won either Best Actor or Best Actress in four of the last five years, and the Academy has gotten a lot less reticent to award second (or even third) Oscars lately, so I’ll be slotting Leo right near the top of my list.
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Speaking of repeat Oscar winners, Penn hasn’t been Oscar nominated since he won his second Best Actor trophy for Milk in 2010. In fact, Penn has been more notable for giving his Oscar statues away than giving the kind of performances that could earn him a third one. Until now. Lockjaw is the kind of standout supporting villain of which Best Supporting Actor victories are made. Penn’s personality has never been cuddly (to put it quite mildly), and he’s almost certainly the most likely cast member to send the film’s Oscar campaign off course with a reckless comment to the press. But he’s also historically been popular among actors. And he really is a hoot in the movie, bestowing his character with a ridiculous gait and a maniacal affect that could prove very difficult for award voters to resist.
One downside of a Penn supporting actor campaign is that it would likely crowd out Benicio del Toro, who is doing much quieter but no less effective work as Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, a martial-arts instructor and community leader in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross. Not only is del Toro’s decision to underplay his character a smart and funny counter to the frantic action and paranoid flailing from the likes of DiCaprio, he’s a great conduit for the film’s less bombastic ideas about resistance to government aggression.
Best Supporting Actress offers the most intriguing angle on One Battle After Another and the Oscars, with Taylor, Infiniti, and Hall all delivering performances that deserve to be mentioned among the year’s best. Taylor owns the first third of the film with a righteous fury that only betrays an inner vulnerability at the most crucial moments. It’s a performance that lingers whenever she’s not onscreen, and the only reason she’s not a Best Actress contender is screen time. In Taylor’s absence steps young Infiniti, whose performance presents initially as softer and quieter, before transforming as the film barrels toward its climax. My guess is that Hall will end up as the odd woman out in this scenario, as her character’s screen time and prominence is more limited, but in those small moments, she shines through with a grit and determination that’s remarkable given how well she’s known for her comedic skills.
The PTA of It All
Paul Thomas Anderson has only ever directed two movies that were ignored completely by the Academy: his debut feature, Hard Eight, and his lamentably overlooked masterpiece Punch-Drunk Love. (And if you’re looking for a spare Oscar-season narrative, an Adam Sandler Oscar breakthrough for Jay Kelly coming in the same year that Paul Thomas Anderson might finally win an Oscar is a good one.) Despite the fact that he has never won, Anderson is a filmmaker who Academy voters pay attention to pretty much every time. And with One Battle After Another, he’s delivered perhaps his most accessible, audience-friendly film since Boogie Nights. It’s a straight-up action-comedy that doesn’t get bogged down in the excesses of Pynchon’s Vineland, instead putting a tight focus on the father-daughter relationship between DiCaprio’s and Infiniti’s characters.
Intentionally or not, Anderson’s masterpieces have carried with them alienating elements, from Magnolia’s rain of frogs to There Will Be Blood’s gory denouement. “Accessible” may be in the eye of the beholder with PTA, but after The Master and Inherent Vice pushed as far as he’s ever pushed in the direction of formal and narrative standoffishness, he’s been inching closer to something friendlier to mass audiences. Phantom Thread was a romance, after all, however comedically dark and twisted it was; he then opted for pure nostalgia with Licorice Pizza. Both films picked up Best Picture and Best Director nominations for PTA, but both remained a bit limited in their appeal. If the Academy was composed entirely of people whose love language was poison mushrooms and grew up in the San Fernando Valley, Anderson’s mantle would be lousy with Oscar statues right now.
But even for those queasy about this country’s inexorable turn toward fascism, I think One Battle After Another will prove to be a crowd-pleaser: well-paced with action and comedic beats and with a strong undergirding of the kind of clear emotional through-lines that award voters go for. If I wasn’t already sold on the film’s Oscar potential, its ending — which delivers catharsis over ambiguity in a way I wasn’t really expecting — convinced me. Couple that with a campaign that emphasizes Anderson’s nearly unparalleled body of work, and Warner has a ton to work with. Yes, it’s a long road to March 15, and the last thing a studio wants is to be saddled with the weight of too-early Oscar expectations. But in a film year that’s been yearning to take shape, One Battle After Another is what a lot of us have been waiting for: the film to beat.
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