You Win, Hollywood! I Watched One Battle After Another!

I don’t care if the best movies win Academy Awards. As I grumbled a few weeks ago, The Oscars are an industry affair whose winners should be seen as Hollywood’s Employees Of The Year. They're the people and movies that make Hollywood proud. Therefore, there’s no wrong winner. It’s a mirror. A photograph. This was a ceremony created by producers to put artists in competition with each other, in (a thankfully futile) hope of avoiding unionization. We obviously want to see people we like appreciated by their peers, but it’s misguided to wish a needless pretense to meritocracy was closer to being valid. We shouldn’t look to Oscar voters to reflect our tastes, we should look to them to reveal the industry elite’s.

I wish I was better at ignoring the Oscars entirely. Politically, I think it’s crucial to divorce the appreciation of a medium from the predominant industry built around it. A post-union reason the Oscars exist is to let artists outside Hollywood know Hollywood’s watching and digging their scene. Consider Frederick Wiseman and Jackie Chan, both too fucking awesome to ever be nominated for a competitive trophy, but co-opted retroactively with Lifetime Achievement Awards. Pauline Kael knew that shit was for the birds, commenting in 1998 that she was proud to have never seriously discussed the Oscars in her writing, and that their modest value was for admiring clothes and bitching. But she died before search-engine-optimization became the commercial press’ raison d’etre, and I can’t imagine a paid critic today getting away with ignoring the big bash. Even though I’m not getting paid, I do spend a lot of time gauging “the conversation” online. And since I don’t care about the clothes, that mostly leaves me with bitching.

Here’s what I wrote about One Battle After Another in January, which I correctly guessed would be the first 2026 Best Picture nominee I’d see in 2026 (having seen and enjoyed Sinners in ’25): This looks like a chore and a half in terms of a bubble-encased Gen X auteur airing his weird political, racial and sexual hangups. Plus, I like claiming I won’t watch anything starring the problematic cigarette butt named Sean Penn. But I’ve been told it’s enjoyably novel to watch Leonardo DiCaprio play a dad in a comedy, and Benicio Del Toro is always a hoot as somebody’s buddy. I certainly enjoy Leo's manchild Nicholson energy more than Joaquin Phoenix's anguished mugging, as far as artisanal blockbuster content goes. Battle is on HBO MAX already, and I might have a take on it in a week. Or four. It wound up being almost eight weeks, but - fatigued, whimpering from heat stress, and intrigued by Paul Thomas Anderson’s entry into the Golden Boy Club, I’ve now seen the damn thing. 

Call me a typical Libra: I think everyone’s got a point. If you’re a black woman who doesn’t need to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s fantasy of black female revolutionaries, that's totally fair. If you’re a black woman who appreciated Anderson creating complex black female characters with love and affection, that’s also fair. Far less clueless than I expected, I’d file One Battle After Another as a “post-feminist” movie, meaning the male writer-director goes out of his way to suggest agency and interiority in female characters. While Perfida Beverly Hills (thrillingly brought to life by Teyana Taylor) wrestles with the mix of narcissism, paranoia, anger and drive that historically affected many prominent figures in radical politics, Regina Hall’s Deandra suggests no less commitment and far more humility. Perfida has family, shown to be smart and loving. When Deandra takes Chase Infiniti’s Willa to a convent, it's some true For Your Bechdel Test Consideration. Meanwhile, the interchangeable white male villains are straight out of a ‘60s satire: sex-addled military men, nameless goons and genteel racist conspirators. It’s clear who has Anderson’s sympathy and respect.

However, that doesn’t mean they have his attention. While black women wrestle soulfully with their hearts and minds, and the Latin-American immigrant community is vital and quick, the film's central character is a White Man Who Means Well. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob, due to some mix of heartbreak, single parenting and excessive vaping, goes from being a spirited bomb expert to more frazzled version of The Dude from The Big Lebowski after a 16-year time jump (he was an ex-revolutionary, too!). Bob's flustered by the increasing independence of Willa (his daughter with Perfida), modern gender terminology and how “sensitive” radicals have become. But again, he Means Well. Just like the leads in The Killing Fields, Cry Freedom, Mississippi Burning, Dallas Buyers Club, Green Book, Argo…oh, just about any big Hollywood movie concerning the global plight of the non-white. 

Admittedly, recent Best Picture winners Moonlight, Everything Everywhere All At Once and Parasite suggest an overwhelmingly non-white movie not about The State Of America Today can get the trophy, which is swell. But I had to laugh when I realized One Battle After Another was using race, sex, immigration and radical politics as prelude for a movie primarily about White Dad Feelings, a bathrobe-fond bohemian forced to step up and (at least help) save his daughter from Overt Racism and The Military-Industrial Complex, which primarly takes the form of the star of Taps: Legacy. Almost literally, as Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, the cartoon alpha male forever bugabooed by Perfida, is played by Taps’ Sean Penn. A fact that made my laugh both louder and darker.

Phrases you can type next to Sean Penn’s name if you don’t know why I’d be repulsed by him: Madonna abuse, Theron Last Face, COVID NLRB, journalists Chavez, Jewel roadie, feminized masculinity, El Chapo, Gibson Madman, debut novel. There isn’t a smoking gun there, but I subscribe to Katt Williams’ logic that if people are saying you’re something for twenty years, you’re that. And I think Sean Penn is a violent hothead who forces himself unthinkingly into fraught situations to feed his ego and libido. I don’t like seeing him in movies, and I’m not glad Paul Thomas Anderson keeps casting Penn as villains of status when he’s been otherwise reduced to flop indies over the last decade. I’m not impressed Penn is willing and able to play a violent, power-abusing hothead in big-budget movie, and I certainly don’t think it merited a third Oscar. Between this and Adrien Brody’s win last year, there’s clearly a large number of Academy voters who hate people like me mocking jerkwads of ambiguous toxicity, and are delighted to champion “victims of cancel culture” when they finally get in a movie with a PR campaign. Fuck you too, AMPAS. I hope you enjoyed Brody’s gum and Penn’s no-show.

Oh right, the movie! If I stop thinking about OBAA's complicity in Hollywood’s failings, Hollywood straight-up cheering the movie for that complicity (Penn’s third Oscar!), I can acknowledge that DiCaprio is quite winning as a goofy girldad. As a fairly hapless but certainly committed father myself, also dumped by a woman with far more drive (though we co-parent fine), I’m not mad to see The Last Movie Star portray my archetype on the big screen. While I can only benefit, it remains more than a bit cringe to see the archetype made heroic and centered in our current geopolitical situation. Still, if you’re hungry to see capable women deal with complicated situations - and you’re inured to white guys hogging the limelight - One Battle After Another has plenty to love. If the movie was led by Benicio Del Toro and Regina Hall as former lovers (man, just imagine!) split by differing opinions on radical violence, forced to reunite to help their daughter, it would have had a tenth of the budget. There are a lot of movies about white male dumbasses where non-white people, particularly women, don't get to be awesome and epic all around them. Ignoring that would be centering another white dad’s feelings.

Rather than go into my thoughts on the Paul Thomas Anderson oeuvre, I think I’ll save them for when I watch Licorice Pizza, a film I avoided because, again, Sean Penn, and because we have bittersweet feelings about our horny, entertainment-obsessed adolescence at home. After Another, I feel compelled to catch up with the auteur, who at least sees and loves the world revolving around his navel, and isn’t afraid to put that navel on a potbelly. And the use of hills in the climax! Dude's got visual chops, he's outgrown his post-SNL Altman shit, Phantom Thread rules, and we're probably both embarrassed how much we loved Magnolia in our twenties. I’ll likely catch The Secret Agent first, though. And Bugonia. It Was Just An Accident. If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You. Not Marty Supreme. This movie finally got me, but I’m still trying to not have an informed opinion about Timothee Chalamet. Can't Dad just call him a punk?

You can reach me at anthonyisright at gmail dot com, if you must.