As he accepted the Best Picture Oscar last night for his rollicking chase movie One Battle After Another, the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson cast his mind back to 1975, and the murderer’s row of films selected by Oscar as the best of that year: Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Barry Lyndon, Nashville, and the category’s eventual winner, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “There is no best among them,” Anderson said. “There is just what the mood might be that day.”
What’s funny, though, is that Anderson’s earnest, generous logic (why are we competing and besting? What are we doing?) didn’t much apply to his own category mates: there was no day when the mood may have shifted support to an F1 win, or a Sentimental Value one. This was, as proven by a night of endless back and forth between them, a two-horse race between One Battle and Ryan Coogler’s vampire actioner Sinners. It meant an otherwise well-reviewed and successful movie like Marty Supreme went home entirely empty-handed, while – for all its early buzz and ubiquitous Jessie Buckley Best Actress wins this awards season – even Hamnet felt curiously irrelevant come the ceremony itself. And it made the Academy’s recent insistence on turning the Best Picture category into a 10-horse race, whether it’s warranted or not, seem completely redundant.
