Why Battle After Battle Should Win the Best Picture Oscar | Oscars 2026

Viva la Revolution And don’t forget your password, your pronouns, your plaid, and your gun. “Battle After Battle,” from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, is the rebellious rebel insider in this year’s Oscar race; A stunning Hollywood spectacle of the state of the nation that feels as disjointed and unstable as the country it depicts. The film both hates America and loves it. He is on the side of the angels even when they are not quite sure who they are. She lights a candle to curse the darkness, praying to God that she didn’t accidentally pick up a stick of dynamite.

“We have to stay out of politics,” Wim Wenders advised his fellow directors at the Berlin Film Festival last month, and yet “Battle After Battle” is political at hand, deeply tied to the here and now, and fully anticipates the thrust of Donald Trump’s second term. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Bob, a man on fire turned to burning stone, who belatedly drags himself off the couch when his daughter Willa (Chase Infinity) is arrested. Loosely quoting Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, the film updates the book’s tumultuous post-1960s ICE era in the 2020s, as the plot moves from an immigrant detention camp to a sanctuary city to uncover a Christian nationalist cell within the US federal government. The self-styled “Christmas Adventurers” are on a heaven-sent mission to make America great again. They say: “If you want to save the planet, you always start with migration.”

Anderson’s story is volatile. Jonny Greenwood’s tense score set the pace of the match. Battle after battle plays out like a melody made up of musical notes, or a set of conflicting component parts. According to the Golden Globes, it’s a comedy, and it’s every bit as honest as it is raunchy, raunchy, and full of mischief. But it’s also always dangerous. Colonel Lockjaw, Sean Penn’s smug villain, is cartoonish, almost clownish, but he’s cartoonish in the style of someone like Gregory Bovino, the real-life Border Patrol captain who led his comrades into Minneapolis. Perhaps most fascists are buffoons who are easy to laugh at; Maybe this works to their advantage. They use laughter as a cover when they order your daughter to be shot dead in the street.

If Battle After Battle isn’t an obvious comedy, it’s not a partisan political picture either, at least not in the way Wenders understands it. Yes, her natural sympathies are with the underdog, the fighters for social justice, but she knows that the struggle is exhausting, futile, and that the battle lines have long since blurred. The puzzling question of Willa’s true parentage, for example, echoes the plot of Mark Twain’s nineteenth-century novel Puddledhead Wilson, in which a supposedly black child is swapped for a supposedly white one. Twain’s tale exposed the racist lie behind slavery. Anderson’s film explodes the red-state and blue-state divide. Real America is marbled and messy. Everyone was moved together. And if they try as they might, neither the left nor the right – the 75 Frenchmen or the Christmas adventurers – can melt the pot, or put the genie back in its bottle. The future is mixed and looks woeful.

Oscar winners don’t have to come at the right time, but sometimes it helps, especially this year when the stakes are so high: when too many people are afraid to speak up and rock the boat; When Warner Bros – the film’s backer – is about to be swallowed up by Trump-friendly Paramount Skydance. “Battle After Battle” is not my favorite Anderson picture (that would be “The Master”). It’s not even my favorite Best Picture nominee (that’s a three-way tie with Sinners and The Secret Agent). But it’s the right movie for now, an epic movie of old-school stars and bars. Lawless, scattered, and swinging in all directions. Hollywood is used to churning out ambitious, sprawling productions like this on a semi-regular basis. Today, one battle after another seems unique. It may be the last great American whale.

No wonder the blundering Bob lost his appetite for fighting. The arc of history is slowly bending. Sometimes it bends backwards. However, Anderson’s film insists that the effort is worth it, that every small victory is worth 100 defeats. The ending is corny in the way that Lockjaw is cartoonish, which means it’s exciting, poignant, and ringing with hope. This suggests that revolutionaries like Pope cannot take us that far. They struggle, they fail, and then they pass the torch on to the next generation. Maybe their kids will do a little better. Maybe they’ll take the torch and run with it.