There is not much joy in celebrating when the favourite wins. There is not the same smug gratification or sense of superiority that comes with having your against-the-odds bet come to glorious, unlikely fruition. And yet seeing One Battle After Another, the frontrunner by all accounts, pick up Best Picture at the Oscars on Sunday felt so good. So right. For once, the Academy didn’t mess this up.
First, before any talk of industry politics or awards history, the film on face value: it is a powerhouse of an Oscar winner. The story of a washed up revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) on the run with his disbelieving daughter (Chase Infiniti), it reveals itself in parts like a magician’s endless string of handkerchiefs, subplots of wildly different tones knotted together by Paul Thomas Anderson’s cinematic sensibility – and the manic score of Jonny Greenwood.
And while the bookies had it down as the safe bet this weekend, don’t be fooled into thinking One Battle After Another is a film that ever plays it safe. In fact, its mood is so disparate and shifting that it’s impossible to pin down exactly what the movie even is: a father-daughter epic, a political satire, a screwball comedy, an action thriller? Answer: all of the above and more.
Really, it’s a minor miracle that financing came through for a film so expensive and odd (its secret society of white supremacists is Christmas-themed, with its members greeting one another with a “Hail, St Nick!”). One Battle After Another cost a reported $130m, a steep ask for an auteur like Anderson who, despite having a devout following of his own, is no Christopher Nolan when it comes to box office pull. Enter DiCaprio, one of the tiny handful of stars in the world bankable enough to get something like this off the ground.
It is money well spent. The action set pieces, shot on location around California, are completely thrilling. One car chase scene that unfolds over a series of cresting hills is masterful and tense. It has all the raw, gritty texture of a vintage thriller, thanks to the VistaVision camera the film was shot on – it’s a 35mm format that died out in the 1960s and which Anderson insisted on using despite its price tag.
DiCaprio himself is on top form here as the raggedy, tartan robe-wearing ex-revolutionary and girl-dad “Bob Ferguson”, whose mind is so far gone from drugs that he can’t recall the password that might save his daughter’s life.
But as with any deserving Best Picture winner, it’s the supporting players who really fortify this case. Teyana Taylor (as Bob’s erratic, vanished ex), Benicio del Toro (as his fiercest ally), and Sean Penn (as his self-loathing pursuer) all turn in watermark performances, a feat recognised by their respective Supporting Oscar nominations. (Penn, while skipping out on the ceremony itself, took home Best Supporting in the end.) And who doesn’t love a transformative turn? To play the role of a long-standing revolutionary still devoted to the cause, Anderson chose a comedic actor most recognised for the Scary Movie franchise: Regina Hall, in a rare dramatic turn, devours it.
Not for nothing does the film also feature a superb debut courtesy of Chase Infiniti, who is excellent and clear-eyed as Bob’s teenage daughter, Willa. Anderson and his casting team did the industry a favour by introducing Infiniti to the world – and giving them a Best Picture award was really the least they could do in return.
Remarkably, this was the first Best Picture win for the maker of masterpieces like Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights, Phantom Thread, and – depending on your mileage for trippy, meandering noirs – Inherent Vice (his other Thomas Pynchon adaptation, One Battle loosely based on his 1990 satire Vineland). And going into the ceremony, there was a pervading sense that an Anderson triumph is overdue, but it’s worth noting that this wasn’t some “aw shucks, just give it to him” retroactive move – as was the case when Martin Scorsese won his first (!) Best Director prize in 2007 for The Departed, a perfectly good film but not a scratch on GoodFellas or Taxi Driver. Anderson winning for One Battle After Another was warranted. It was just.
This brings us to the greater good – and the net positive that this win will do in the long-run. For better or worse, winning an Oscar or not winning an Oscar shapes one’s work going forward. Look at Steven Spielberg, a director whose later output was no doubt defined by the lack of formal recognition he received for early and deserving films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET. In search of that industry validation, Spielberg turned his hand instead to weightier fare, finally clinching it with 1993’s Schindler’s List.
You could make the argument that in Anderson’s case, this doesn’t matter so much. One Battle certainly isn’t a movie made in response to years of snubs, and you sense that there would have been little change to his output even if he didn’t take the top Oscar prize. But wasn’t it nice that he did?
