As Movies Adapt to the Times, the Oscars Can Only Look On
In Hollywood, and at the Oscars, “hope” is a very big word. Chloé Zhao used it in her recorded introduction to a clip from her film “Hamnet,” and Conan O’Brien, hosting the festivities, offered it as a reason to hold that big party in troubled times. He exhorted the crowd to enjoy the night “in the spirit of optimism.” But the most hopeful moment of this year’s ceremony came at the very end, when the final award, for Best Picture, was bestowed upon “One Battle After Another.” Its writer and director, Paul Thomas Anderson, a film-history fanatic who’d already just collected two awards (for Best Director and for Best Adapted Screenplay), offered a history lesson, citing the five nominees for Best Picture who were in the running fifty years ago, at the 1976 ceremony: “Jaws,” “Barry Lyndon,” “Nashville,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (which won). Here’s the good news: the best four of this year’s ten nominees in the category—“Sinners,” “The Secret Agent,” “Marty Supreme,” and, yes, “One Battle After Another”—are better movies than those five putative classics. (I’m sure that Anderson didn’t mean it that way, but, to quote Hamnet’s dad, “What’s done is done.”)
What makes these new films better is their wilder, freer, more original and personal approach to cinematic form, in addition to their candor about history—their directors’ manifest self-consciousness regarding their own, and their films’, place in the world, and in the art of movies itself. As Lynette Howell Taylor, the president of the Academy, said in her speech, the organization that voted on these awards comprises more than eleven thousand members, from around the world, and, at least to some extent, the results suggest greater openness and curiosity than earlier generations of Oscars might have shown. “One Battle After Another” was the night’s big winner, with awards in six categories (Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Editing, and the first ever for Casting), ahead of “Sinners,” with four (Actor, Cinematography, Original Screenplay, and Score), and the tone of O’Brien’s opening monologue, oscillating between zingers and earnest gravity, suggests why.
“One Battle After Another,” with its opening scene involving a military-run concentration camp for rounded-up immigrants, its colossal second half centered on organized resistance to help immigrants avoid government raids, and its vision of a cabal of white (and Christian) supremacists holding secret sway in Washington, was practically torn from the headlines in advance. Its vision of indignation and resistance lurked behind every one of O’Brien’s thinly veiled jokes about Donald Trump (whose name was never mentioned) and his reference to “chaotic, frightening times,” and behind Jimmy Kimmel’s gag on the muzzled media of “North Korea and CBS,” and echoed the acceptance speech of David Borenstein, a co-director of “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” (which won Best Documentary Feature), who explained, correctly, that his film shows the authoritarian outcome of compromise, complicity, and government co-option of media. “One Battle After Another” is a movie of notable artistry, indeed one of the year’s best, but its triumph is less aesthetic than political.
The consolidation of media looms over the year’s awards in an innate way, too: both “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” (directed by Ryan Coogler) were produced by Warner Bros. The movie-division heads who had the foresight to green-light two such audacious projects, Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca, were both hired by David Zaslav, soon after he became Warner’s C.E.O., when the studio merged with Discovery. Now, of course, Warner Bros. Discovery has accepted a takeover offer by David Ellison, who has already acquired Paramount—and, with it, CBS—with the result that the network’s news division has been placed in Bari Weiss’s hands, and Paramount’s slate of releases has been severely thinned out. If the deal is concluded, it’s hard to imagine Warner Bros. backing such artistically bold and politically candid movies.
“Sinners,” set in rural Mississippi in 1932, is a story of Black twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan, who won the Oscar for Best Actor) who, flush with money they stole from gangsters, open a juke joint and find themselves menaced by the Ku Klux Klan and by an altogether unexpected enemy: white folk-music vampires. The film’s meticulous detailing of life under Jim Crow and its allegorical vision of the cultural predation and erasure facing Black art and culture are no less relevant to current events than the action in “One Battle After Another,” but the kinds of stories it tells aren’t those of the headlines. This isn’t Coogler’s fault, needless to say, but that of the people who decide the headlines. (Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s nominated documentary feature “The Alabama Solution,” about Jim Crow-like oppressions prevalent in prisons today, stands in a similar relation to the Best Documentary Feature winner, “Mr. Nobody Against Putin”.)
Although Anderson won for direction—and I’d contend that the scene that put it in the bag for him is the bravura chase near the end, which is dramatically arbitrary but old-school exciting in a way that few action films manage to be—the triumph of Coogler’s directing found acknowledgment in the award for Jordan’s twin performances. Directing and acting are inextricably connected; all the nominated performers are skillful and charismatic, but the distinction of their performances also conveys the tone that the directors set and the substance and range that the scripts offer. In “Sinners,” Coogler does more than tweak genre; he tweaks genre acting. Though there’s exuberant energy and hectic comedy, gravity prevails throughout, and Jordan, tapping into it, turns the dual roles into ones that, for all their expansive power, are anchored by a fundamental, nearly sacramental quiet. It’s a performance that invites viewers to lean in and listen closely—exactly the opposite of what Anderson gets from Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn in “One Battle After Another.” In that movie, blusteringly goofy roles yielded performances that were monotonous and hollow. Penn won for Supporting Actor nonetheless, and it’s noteworthy that he defeated Benicio del Toro, from the same movie, whose performance—altogether finer, subtler, and more imaginative—is far less showy. This was a classic case of the award going for the most acting rather than the best acting.
A similar misconception prevailed in the award for Best Editing, and the mistake was heralded by the preamble of its presenters, the father-and-son pair Bill and Lewis Pullman, which expressed the view that good editing should be “invisible.” If the winner, “One Battle After Another,” doesn’t quite meet that classical ideal, it doesn’t brazenly reject it, either—in stark contrast to the editing in “Marty Supreme,” which is by far the most original of the year. And, although “Marty Supreme” is arguably a case of the most editing, it’s also something of a manifesto on editing itself, a work of kaleidoscopic fragmentation that seems to belong to an entirely different artistic generation than Anderson’s. The editing of “Marty Supreme” was done by Josh Safdie, the film’s director, and his co-writer, Ronald Bronstein, two independent-film luminaries who brought a shattered-glass sensibility to the finished product. (“Marty Supreme” was, startlingly, not even nominated for Original Score; I found the electronic score, by Daniel Lopatin, to be both overbearing and unforgettable, far more distinctive than most of the nominees.) The film’s outsider style remains out of bounds even when crafted inside the borders of Hollywood.
The generational gap on display in the hall—and even more evident outside it, in living rooms—was reflected in the side business of comic sketches about the movie industry. One burlesqued the Oscar broadcast’s impending move to YouTube, in 2029. Another, about translating the show into youth lingo (ending with “six-seven”), elicited a seemingly spontaneous addendum from O’Brien, to the effect that no young person watches network television, anyway. There was a skit about a company engaged in “preserving film history . . . for the smart-phone generation” by hacking movies’ horizontal rectangles into vertical slices: thus the title of “The Godfather Part II becomes “odfat II.” And O’Brien and Sterling K. Brown did a routine impersonating Humphrey Bogart and Dooley Wilson in “Casablanca,” to show how that film might have been, had it followed Netflix’s “second screen” guideline, about repeating previously dispensed narrative information, on the assumption that viewers are distracted by another screen.
Clearly, Hollywood is running scared from streaming, short-form videos, and the perception of generational obsolescence. O’Brien did a riff about Amazon being shut out of this year’s Oscars, capped with the quip “Why isn’t the website I order toilet paper from winning more Oscars?” First, history: in 1966, Paramount became part of the Gulf and Western conglomerate, which produced industrial chemicals, ran parking lots, and owned funeral homes; for much of the nineteen-eighties, Columbia Pictures (now called Sony) was owned by Coca-Cola. Nothing wrong with a laugh, but in 2025 Amazon released one of the year’s best movies, “Hedda,” which should have been nominated in a bunch of categories, including Best Picture, Direction (Nia DaCosta), Lead Actress (Tessa Thompson), Supporting Actress (Nina Hoss), Adapted Screenplay (DaCosta’s script is based on Ibsen’s play “Hedda Gabler”), and Cinematography (Sean Bobbitt). I suspect that the film’s provenance did indeed count against it with Academy members, but the result is deeply unfortunate for the art of movies.
With these tensions and anxieties in the foreground, the ceremony was oddly divided against itself. The tone of its plentiful political humor, more wry than confrontational, suggests yet another element of fear, issuing from the heavy hand of Donald Trump on the future of studios; the Department of Justice’s antitrust division is expected to approve David Ellison’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. With the movie business facing political, economic, technological, sociological, and generational pressures, this year’s ceremony had something of a funereal air. Much of the comedy went far beyond jibes into gallows humor, concluding with a parody of the ending of “One Battle After Another” in which O’Brien, offered the job of the Oscars’ Host for Life by the fascistic Christmas Adventurers, ends up murdered and cremated.
That sense of doom may be why the memorial segment, so often of a pro-forma show of melancholy, felt unusually raw, even continuous with the whole: Billy Crystal spoke of his friends Rob and Michele Reiner, Rachel McAdams eulogized Diane Keaton, and, above all, Barbra Streisand commemorated Robert Redford. She recalled working with him on “The Way We Were” and concluded by singing that movie’s title song, with a fervor that seemed to surge forth with the pent-up power of a lifetime.
Between Streisand’s gloriously nostalgic performance and Anderson’s fond reminders of the 1976 Oscars, the idea that Hollywood’s best days are in the rearview mirror emerged as the official line of the ceremony. On the other hand, for all the mournful reserve of the stage business, the movies that were most celebrated exhibited neither political timidity nor artistic caution. The real point of the Oscars is the movies, and the question isn’t whether great ones will continue to be made but whether that will still happen in Hollywood. ♦