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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Peter Bradshaw

Bafta has caught the zeitgeist with One Battle After Another, but let’s hear it for The Ballad of Wallis Island

BAFTAs Tim Key Paul Thomas Anderson Sean Penn John Davidson
Horribly familiar … Teanna Taylor and Sean Penn in One Battle After Another
Worryingly familiar … Teanna Taylor and Sean Penn in One Battle After Another, which has 14 Bafta nominations. Photograph: Courtesy Warner Bros Pictures

The Bafta nominations list underscores the enormous award-season love being felt for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, his subversive vampire riff on America’s black experience – though it isn’t making history in quite the same way as it is at the Oscars, having 13 Bafta nominations, one behind Paul Thomas Anderson’s league-leader One Battle After Another with 14.

The awards-season prominence of Anderson’s epic antifa parable, inspired by the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, with Leonardo DiCaprio as a dishevelled, clueless ex-revolutionary facing off against Sean Penn’s brutal honcho Colonel Lockjaw, is happening at a queasily appropriate zeitgeist moment. The grotesquely trigger-happy immigration officers of ICE are shooting people dead on US streets and this ugly fiasco is giving us a horribly familiar-looking new figure.

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