The New Yorker:

Every awards season is one battle after another, and the ninety-eighth Academy Awards ceremony promises a more climactic showdown than most.

By Justin Chang

It’s hardly going out on a limb to predict that Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” the two most passionately acclaimed and culturally significant American movies of 2025, will divide most of the spoils when the ninety-eighth Academy Awards are handed out, on March 15th. Nor would it be especially bold, at this point in the game, to predict a Best Picture win for either film. On paper, “One Battle After Another” looks nearly unstoppable; the sheer number of best-film prizes that it’s scooped up in recent months, from organizations including the Critics’ Choice Association, the Golden Globes, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and the Producers Guild of America, has vaulted it to a place of enviable statistical strength. But statistics can be defied, and “Sinners,” a much-praised box-office smash that earned a record-setting sixteen nominations, may have succeeded in positioning itself as an underdog with a momentum that may have crested at just the right time. Last week, during the final stretch of Oscars voting, Coogler’s film won the Screen Actors Guild’s top ensemble prize—an honor that has presaged more than a few Best Picture upsets over the years, including “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), “Crash” (2005), and “Parasite” (2019).

I’m predicting “One Battle After Another,” for reasons of prudence and personal preference. Whether I’m right or not is immaterial; what’s fascinating and heartening about this particular showdown is how ideally matched the two films are, how right they feel as kindred spirits. “Sinners” has its roots in Coogler’s original script, but his writing cleverly repurposes familiar horror-genre conventions; “One Battle After Another” is an adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel “Vineland,” but one so shaggily inventive as to feel sui generis. Both films are deeply enveloping, ensemble-driven action-thrillers about, among other things, the Sisyphean folly of resistance in a nation run by white supremacists. The films inhabit two separate points on a decades-spanning American historical continuum—“Sinners” unfolds during the Jim Crow era, “One Battle After Another” at an indeterminate moment closer to the present day—but they share a steadfast belief in the prevailing power of love, to say nothing of the potential of the next generation of rebels.

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