If you're the betting type, you might as well put everything you've got on One Battle After Another to win big at this year's Oscars. That's not necessarily an endorsement, given the Academy Awards' record of rewarding treacly, smug, politically convenient cringe cinema.
To be fair, One Battle After Another is a far better movie than Crash or Green Book. The latest from Paul Thomas Anderson is a loose—very loose—adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, with the book's Ronald Reagan-era setting updated to the present. And Anderson is one of the most accomplished directors of the last three decades: There Will Be Blood is one of the two or three best movies of the 2000s, and he's directed a handful of other modern classics. Even his worst movies have quite a bit to recommend.
But One Battle After Another, despite some standout moments, is not one of his best. The reason is that it caters precisely to the sort of self-satisfied, self-flattering liberalism that Hollywood likes to reward.
