Viva la revolución! — why One Battle After Another should win the academy award this year

Films have never stayed out of politics. They never should.

In 2024, Jonathan Glazer accepted the Academy Award for Best Director for The Zone of Interest — and used the podium to draw an explicit parallel between the Holocaust and the war in Gaza. 

That same evening, Oppenheimer took Best Picture: a film wrestling openly with American culpability over Hiroshima. Neither film pretended politics were someone else's business. 

This year, despite the suggestion to stay out of politics by Wim Wenders to his fellow filmmakers at the Berlin Film Festival last month, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is battling the race with his 'timely political thriller', One Battle After Another. 

This year's field is formidable. Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, Ryan Coogler's Sinners, and The Secret Agent are all serious, deserving contenders. But One Battle After Another does something the others do not — it makes a statement. 

In a moment when cinema is being nudged away from the political, when the Oscar stage itself risks being sanitised into irrelevance, Anderson's film arrives like a provocation, pushing back against everything the current establishment is working to normalise.

The timing could not be more charged. ICE detains immigrants. America strains against its own founding contradictions. Donald Trump is back in the White House. If the Academy has ever needed to say something with its highest prize, it is now.

One Battle After Another announces itself as a comedy — and it partly earns that label. It is rambunctious, profane, and frequently mischievous indeed. But Paul Thomas Anderson's latest is never merely that.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob, a former radical now reduced to couch-bound inertia, who reluctantly stirs into action when his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) is abducted. Loosely drawn from Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, the film transplants the book's post-sixties disillusionment into the ICE-era present, lurching through migrant detention facilities and sanctuary cities before exposing a Christian Nationalist conspiracy embedded within the federal government. Their creed is chilling in its simplicity: save the planet by closing the borders.

Jonny Greenwood's restless score keeps everything on edge, and the film's tonal instability feels entirely deliberate — atonal notes somehow resolving into something coherent. Sean Penn's Colonel Lockjaw is broadly drawn, almost farcical, yet Anderson makes a pointed argument about that very quality. Most authoritarians, the film suggests, are ridiculous until they are not The laughter they invite becomes useful camouflage.

Then again, it is not exactly a straightforward political cinema. Anderson's sympathies clearly lie with the marginalised, but he's clear-eyed about the grind of resistance — its repetitions, its erosions, its compromised loyalties. The question of Willa's parentage quietly echoes Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, using blurred bloodlines to detonate the myth of a neatly divided nation. Red and blue, Anderson argues, have long since bled into each other. The future, embodied in Willa, is irreducibly mixed — and no faction, however determined, can reverse that.

Oscar contenders do not have to be timely, but this time, it is. When people are afraid to speak up, and white supremacy is at its peak, One Battle After Another appears as a messiah. Even though Sinners is an instant classic, and Hamnet will be studied for generations, One Battle After Another should be the one to win — to make a statement.