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You could argue that director Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent sentiment of “I’m not a politician… I’m a filmmaker” summarizes why he has gone zero and 11 at the Oscars in the first place. No, awards contenders need not concern themselves with the specifics of tariffs, for example, but these Oscar campaigns are inherently political.
To be fair to him, on-the-spot interviews in the winners room after an awards show like the BAFTAs do not yield the most thought-out answers, so I’ll share something that I recently experienced at a “One Battle After Another” screening I attended on the Warner Bros. lot, where the director was joined onstage by his star Leonardo DiCaprio and producer Sara Murphy. Anderson responded to a question about his reaction to his latest film seeming so “timely” by saying, “I can’t say it feels great and I can’t say that it makes me happy. It just makes me feel peculiar. It’s just a movie, at the end of the day. It’s just supposed to be an action movie about a guy trying to get his daughter back. And, what I see every day, it weighs heavy on my heart for the world.”
Though his description is true to the core of the film’s plot, “One Battle After Another” has more than one sequence of Latino migrants being liberated from the oppression of immigration enforcement led by the film’s antagonist, who is connected to a sinister cabal of wealthy conservative white men. This particular screening happened about a week after intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by U.S. Border Patrol, so it was a subject that was weighting on the audience’s minds.
Therefore, it was clear what Anderson was alluding to when he added, “It was nice to come into the back of the theater and sneak in and watch everybody laughing and enjoying it. Actually, that warmed me up. It’s just a film. It’s supposed to be funny and entertain you and have fun, but it’s a fucking trip really to see those Christmas Adventurers talk the way they talk, and I don’t know, it seems there’s got to be a room like that somewhere right now. Dudes talking like that.”
Director Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio take part in a Q&A following a screening of ‘One Battle After Another’ on September 10, 2025 at Steven J. Ross Theater on the Warner Bros. Studio lot in Burbank, CaliforniaShutterstock for Warner Bros.But this all relates to the politics of awards campaigns as well. Outside of a handful of interviews he did in advance of the film’s release, often with DiCaprio by his side, Anderson seemingly chose to refrain from doing any more press, focusing only on the more controlled environment of post-screening Q&As that, for the most part, are attended exclusively by awards voters.
When the film came out in September 2025, there was not as much of a focus on what the film had to say about immigration in America outside the scope of what we see onscreen. When things took a turn at the beginning of the year, with the ICE raids in Minneapolis and the killing of Renée Good mirroring the terror Sean Penn’s character Colonel Lockjaw inflicts on the immigrant-heavy community of Baktan Cross (all happening parallel to the film winning several Golden Globes, and earning 13 Oscar nominations), awards season watchers began to question if anyone in the largely press-shy “One Battle After Another” camp would be willing to speak on the Best Picture nominee’s particular urgency.
And the reason that is even a question in the first place is because Anderson doesn’t really have to. As I’ve previously addressed in this column, “One Battle After Another” already had massive Oscar buzz surrounding it, partially because Anderson has never won before. And, as soon as people got to see the film (and loved it), that line of thinking, that the innovative filmmaker is owed an Oscar, went into effect.
After all, most of the filmmakers we think of as living legends, like Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese, received their Best Director Oscar several films and nominations after the movie that put them on a pedestal.
The odd part of this year is that, if you took “One Battle After Another” out of the race, Ryan Coogler, the man behind fellow Warner Bros. Pictures release “Sinners,” would likely win for those same sorts of reasons, becoming the first ever Black filmmaker to win Best Director in the process.
But ultimately we, the audience for the Oscar telecast, are more interested about history being made than the Academy is.
One of the more nerve-wracking results at the 2026 BAFTA Awards was “Marty Supreme” star Timothée Chalamet losing Best Actor to “I Swear” star Robert Aramayo, who isn’t even Academy Awards eligible. In the last 10 years, the Academy has only differed from the BAFTA winner once. Chalamet’s campaign has been much more explicit about the implication he is somehow owed or due for an Oscar, even organizing an American Cinematheque retrospective for the 30-year-old to showcase how much notable work he has done, despite his young age.
And it does seem like this gambit will work, but more because of the perceived feat of receiving back-to-back Best Actor nominations than the fact that he would be the second youngest winner ever in the category. If that factoid really made a difference, then he would’ve broken the record for youngest Best Actor winner last year, over record-holder Adrien Brody.
Stellan Skarsgård, Joachim Trier, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Renate Reinsve at the 2026 EE BAFTA Film Awards held at The Royal Festival Hall on February 22, 2026 in London, EnglandJames McCauley/VarietyThe Best Supporting Actor race calls to mind another interesting facet of this “owed” conversation. The BAFTA winner ended up being “One Battle After Another” star Sean Penn, rather than the perceived frontrunner Stellan Skarsgård, a veteran character actor who finally received his long overdue first Oscar nomination for “Sentimental Value.”
What has been overlooked, however, is that this is the first time Penn has ever won a BAFTA award. So the calculus that we, as Americans, are operating on, thinking that Penn won’t win the Oscar because he has two already, is in tune with why BAFTA voters likely gave them an award. He was owed one.
All this to say, I am holding the line on most of my predictions. While the BAFTA winners were initially surprising in the overall scope of how the awards race is going, they make more sense in the local context.
Best International Feature Oscar frontrunner “The Secret Agent” was not as much of a contender there, since the film has a different distributor in the U.K. Just as Aramayo likely won because of local love for “I Swear,” a biopic about a British activist, “Sinners” star Wunmi Mosaku likely won Best Supporting Actress partially due to her being a hometown hero who has been nominated for a BAFTA Film Award before (and a BAFTA TV Award to boot).
I do think that, in addition to Chalamet, and the ever-dominant “Hamnet” star Jessie Buckley, Golden Globe winner Teyana Taylor will be an Actor Award winner for Best Supporting Actress, given to her for her performance in “One Battle After Another.” But, since Skarsgård was not nominated for Best Supporting Actor, this weekend’s ceremony could very well become the turning point that forces me to change my mind about Penn winning a third Oscar. Especially since Oscar nominee Delroy Lindo is not nominated in that Actor Award category either (though he’ll still get a trophy when “Sinners” likely wins Best Ensemble).
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