Back in 2008, which seems like an eternity ago, the late, great David Carr called me on the phone, as he did every year, to discuss the Oscars. He hadn’t been the Carpetbagger at the New York Times that long. But long enough to have accurately called Crash’s win over Brokeback Mountain. That was an unpredictable year. 2008, however, was not. Slumdog Millionaire had already won the first of the awards, and he asked me, “So what’s gonna happen now?” And I said, “Well, Slumdog is going to win everything.”
That year, he told me later, ended his interest in covering the Oscars. Watching one movie win everything is not fun unless you love seeing the same movie win, and sometimes you do. But if it’s a movie you don’t like, or don’t think should be winning, it can feel like a death march.
I resisted the early claim by the New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan that One Battle After Another would finally win Best Picture for Paul Thomas Anderson. After all, none of them stepped up to say Quentin Tarantino should win for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (which he should have). PTA doesn’t make general audience movies, I told myself. No way will it “win everything.”
Then, as the movie rolled out, and the sploogery commenced, The Oscar Expert and the Brother Bro likewise declared, It’s OVER. They have now seen the winner of the 2026 Oscars, and it’s One Battle After Another. Surely they were rookies making a premature call, I told myself. Come on, there is no way this one movie is going to “win everything.”
Well, now it looks like that is indeed the outcome of this year.
Usually, the industry will want to give a longtime director like PTA the Oscar. They need the right movie. That has led people to compare it to my favorite Best Picture year, 2006, when The Departed finally won the Oscar for Martin Scorsese. The difference is, The Departed was a wild success, a film that embedded itself in American culture, not the elite circles of the Goths, but American culture. It made money. It was thrilling. It wasn’t political or focused on social justice. It wasn’t selling THE MESSAGE.
Still, that’s the idea. I know enough after 26 years of this mess to see that when the water pulls that far back from the shore, the Tsunami will destroy everything with its force. It isn’t so much sentiment for PTA that is driving this. It’s what the movie says about this moment in history and how all of these folks see themselves now.
The film itself is enjoyable enough as a father/daughter story. The best I can say about it is that it is perhaps PTA’s own working through as a father raising mixed-race daughters. And in that way, it is touching. It’s an enjoyable enough movie, too, as long as you don’t see the bigger picture of what it’s saying and the worldview it depicts.
Even people on the Right have said they liked the movie or could see beyond the politics and enjoy it. If you can do that, fine, but I can’t, not after what I’ve lived through over the past ten years.
On the Left, they believe they have been fighting a Great War against “racists.” Or the Ists, the Phobes, the ISMS. All of those bad people over there who do not comply with their ever-strident rules of soft language must be racists. They believe this to their core. Imagine having to share a country with millions of people you believe are evil racists?
Well, that is what they believe. Or at least that is what they tell themselves to justify shutting out half of America for ten years. I know how it all went down. I lived it, and many of you watched. But after a while, after the madness swallowed up Hollywood and all culture, I began to slowly back away and wonder, how did we ever get here?
One Battle After Another is their Schindler’s List. It is the definitive “woke” movie, up to and including the white guy being feminized, hapless, and only there to support the girl boss women. True, it starts like he’s the moral center, the one responsible parent (the first half of the movie is good), but in the second half, when the plot spirals off into Sean Penn is a white supremacist who must now kill his mixed-race daughter so he can join the evil white racist Christians who run the world, it lost me. They are the side that is obsessed with race, in my view, because all of us are judged and categorized by it.
People of color and women of color are to be elevated, and white people, men especially, are to be de-centered from the narrative. One Battle is absolutely everything, everywhere, all at once for this worldview. I guess I didn’t expect Paul Thomas Anderson of all people to go that route.
For a while, I convinced myself that Chloé Zhao’s masterful film, Hamnet, could win. A part of me still holds out hope that this is possible, but the Oscar veteran in me knows that it is over. But Hamnet is Zhao’s best film.
Zhao joins Yorgos Lanthimos, Ari Aster, Noah Baumbach, and yes, Ryan Coogler, who have all turned in their career bests. They don’t scratch the itch, however. None of them tells the industry that they’re the “good people doing good things.” And that is what voters will be looking for.
So let’s look at the charts. One Battle has now made recent history by becoming the first film to win the Gothams, the NBR, the New York Film Critics, and the LA Film Critics. The Gothams only began in 2004, so it’s not that long. But still.
Moving further back, the LA Film Critics began in 1975. The films that won NBR, NYFCC, and LAFCA were Terms of Endearment and Schindler’s List. The only movie that won all of these and not BP was LA Confidential. I might note once again that Terms and Schindler’s, along with Titanic, were all crowdpleasers for everyone, not alienating political screeds that didn’t make money in the US.
And finally, we go back to when it was just New York and NBR. As you can see, there are plenty who won both, not Best Picture. The winning streak happened in the 1950s, which makes sense as it was also a time of conformity, like now (at least on the Left).
2008 was the year that destroyed David Carr’s love of the Oscars, but it was also the year that the Oscars disappeared into their own bubble. While they have always existed to reflect the industry well, around that time, they began forming a singular worldview aligned with politics because of Barack Obama and the rise of the internet, which enabled all of us to build a utopia online.
It isn’t just this movie. It’s also those that are about dictators because inside utopia, the phantasmagoria that a fascist regime occupies America rages on, even among the most seemingly rational. They can’t fathom a working class that would want secure borders and to have people here illegally deported now. And even if there are high-profile scenes of inhumane treatment, that still doesn’t make fascism.
If we were living under a dictator, there wouldn’t be the Golden Globes at all. Paul Thomas Anderson would be in jail or shot on the spot. None of it is real. They seem to be living in their own movie. And now, we’re about to watch the richest and most privileged people in the world project oppression and suffering as they dress up in finery, collect gold statues, and pretend it’s all in the name of democracy. Or something.
How to survive a year like this? If you’re happy with it, great. Celebrate. Otherwise, going through the motions always works, and distracting yourself with a good book or a history podcast until it’s all over with and a new year begins.
It is not easy to generate content day in and day out, as the song remains the same. But I’ve been through many of these. It goes by a lot faster than you think, and a year from now, it will be a distant memory, Paul Thomas Anderson will finally have an Oscar, and probably Benicio Del Toro will have a second. And before long, the whole game will begin anew.
