Paul Thomas Anderson and One Battle After Another are about to steamroll awards season in what I can only call a “death march.” It just won the Directors Guild, and it will likely win the Producers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild, along with the BAFTA and every other award, just before sweeping the Oscars.
This isn’t a direct shot at the movie or PTA’s well-earned moment in the spotlight. Every filmmaker deserves their time to shine eventually, especially one who’s delivered so many daring, original films. I have no beef with that. It’s just that when one movie wins everything under the sun, there isn’t much else to write about. There is nothing that can take this thing down; it is exactly the right movie at exactly the right time.
My problem is with Hollywood itself, the film’s message, and what this whole spectacle is about to scream over the next month. Grab your barf bag.
Once the Oscars wrap, I already know what I’ll see on TikTok: dozens—hundreds—of Black influencers calling the Academy and Hollywood “racist.” They’ll be heartbroken, and the One Battle fans won’t hear a word of it or care. They want what they want, and they want it now. Kyle Buchanan at The New York Times crowned it the frontrunner before most people had even seen it. It was written, so it was done.
The movie bombed domestically, scraping together just $71–72 million against a bloated budget rumored at $130–175 million (we all know Hollywood doesn’t sweat costs when it’s delivering The Correct Message). It made most of its money overseas, where audiences showed up for Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance—so maybe he earned that $20 million payday. Why did it cost so much? Who knows. No one will say it out loud, certainly not at Penske-owned outlets like Variety or Rolling Stone. They won’t risk pissing off Warner Bros. and losing the ad dollars. Things ain’t what they used to be.
Hollywood’s tinkering with its utopian diorama—what Laurie Anderson once called a “perfect little world that doesn’t really need you”—has opened doors for more women and Black filmmakers. Chloé Zhao won an Oscar. Ryan Coogler will probably snag Original Screenplay for Sinners if the plan holds.
But they draw the line at giving Coogler Best Director or Sinners Best Picture. They’ve got their messaging locked in with One Battle After Another, which directs its anger in exactly the approved direction. Sinners, by contrast, is messier—it asks us to accept Coogler’s vision as an artist: that music was a refuge for the truly oppressed, and no, crossing the border illegally into a country that now wants to deport you isn’t oppression in itself. Exploiting those migrants as cheap labor without ever granting full status—like they do in my tiny, wealthy, white town—that’s a lot closer to the real thing.
I can roll with most of it. I can accept that no one wants to be told how to vote, that ballots don’t erase past wrongs. I can buy that people just prefer One Battle After Another because they see themselves in it, regardless of gender or skin color (its intersectional bona fides are part of what lights Film Twitter on fire). Fine. Let it win everything under the sun—even Adapted Screenplay (though Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell actually deserve that one, IMO).
What I can’t stomach is the chorus calling everyone else “racist”—especially after Trump accidentally posted that offensive Obama meme. Yes, it was horrible; yes, good he took it down; yes, everyone should be offended. Calling everyone and everything “racist” started a long time ago, take it from me, one of the OG “woke” bloggers who did nothing but write about race and gender only to wake up inside the mass hysteria Doomsday Cult and be called a “racist,” a “white supremacist,” and a “bigot.” My daughter, my mom, my friends – they all see these monsters crawling out from under rotted logs to hurl insults.
Hollywood has spent a decade casting itself as the virtuous non-racists—the Leonardo DiCaprio of One Battle After Another—while pointing fingers everywhere else. La La Land, Three Billboards, Green Book were treated like apocalyptic racism scandals. That triggered 3,000 new Academy members to “even out” the demographics. The Golden Globes got canceled for being “racist,” then rebuilt with Penske money (yes, the same) and global voters to be more intersectional. The BAFTAs scrapped voting privileges and installed committees to pick the “correct” winners. They all high-fived themselves for fixing the problem as the empire crumbled.
And what got solved? Nothing. Except now they’ve engineered a system where they decide who’s racist and who isn’t, pointing fingers at will—just like One Battle After Another depicts modern America: still racist after all these years.
Well, will the real racists please stand up? Why isn’t Ryan Coogler and Sinners sweeping everything? Why did Penske-owned Rolling Stone and Variety snub Sinners from their top 20 films of the year? Would you like me to call you racists, you critics with such impeccable taste? I’m not going to—because, to quote Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, “I ain’t like that no more.”
Mass hysteria over racism, over sexual assault began with Trump’s win. You can start there if you want, or you can start earlier, as we on the Left colonized the internet and built a Shining Woketopia on the Hill with our beloved, fearless leader, the nation’s First Black President, Barack Obama. It was not just pure love. He became a religious figure to us, and by then, we needed religion.
We’d been spit out of the 1960s counterculture without religion. We chased sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, cults, self-help, and therapy. And eventually, we built an inside online that could lock those we didn’t like outside. That made it very easy to remake the rules of thought and speech. We reinvented language because what was the internet but a world built on words. Every word now has been completely transformed to not mean what it used to mean. Words are weapons, and that’s how we fight our Virtual Civil War, with words.
Hollywood and the ruling class love this New Woke Order because it casts them as the puritans, the Good People of the Left, while they have the easy convenience of pointing their fingers at the Bad People on the Right, the RACISTS.
This is a group of people who clapped when Trevor Noah said Nicki Minaj is not at the Grammys. They can break their rules of not trashing women of color. Go along with us or else. And they call Trump a Fascist? They get to be both rich and stand in judgment. See how convenient that is? The mob will never come for them as long as they genuflect in the right direction.
It could never be that Nicki Minaj knows her own mind and made her own decisions, no. That will be especially true after Memegate. They will punish her for forsaking their One True God, where religion is politics and ideology. Minaj doesn’t see it that way. When you see how they’re treating her, you’ll know what has become of today’s Left with politics as their religion.
Every religion needs a Devil, and that’s what they have in Trump and anyone who votes for him or supports him. Never mind that most of them are working-class, average Americans. To Hollywood, they are human garbage. I know, I’ve walked in their shoes. But Christians know we are all sinners.
For Hollywood, this has been catastrophic. The Grammys ratings plummeted, and the Oscars can only hope people watch, even knowing that the film that’s about to win will be one almost no one saw, and the celebrities like Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn will be in full bloviation mode, judging half the country, lecturing them, and yes, calling them “racists.”
But here’s the thing. If you’re going to call everyone a racist and feel emboldened to do that, whether at the mic at an award show, on social media, or anywhere else, and you’re about to hand Best Picture and Best Director to the less successful film over the more successful film by a Black filmmaker, you can shut the fuck up about racism. Just shut the hell up until you can look in the mirror and see who and what you really are. Then maybe—just maybe—you’ll be in a position to judge the rest of us.
That’s all.
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