The Current Debate connects the dots around a topic of the critical conversation.
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025).
If the Oscars had one undisputed winner this year, it wasn’t a movie, but a studio: Warner Bros., which came away from the ceremony with eleven statuettes. Only three other Hollywood powerhouses had previously racked up as much gold in a single year: MGM for 1959’s Ben-Hur, Paramount for 1997’s Titanic, and New Line Cinema for 2003’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. But what made Warners’ feat especially significant was that the studio bagged awards for three of 2025’s buzziest titles. Zach Cregger’s Weapons took home Best Supporting Actress for Amy Madigan; Ryan Coogler’s Sinners converted four out of its record-breaking sixteen nominations—Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, Best Original Screenplay for director Ryan Coogler, Best Cinematography for Autumn Durald Arkapaw (the first woman to win in the category), and Best Original Score for Ludwig Göransson—while Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another won six—Best Editing for Andy Jurgensen, Best Adapted Screenplay for Paul Thomas Anderson, Best Casting for Cassandra Kulukundis, Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn, Best Directing, and Best Picture.
Coogler’s Jim Crow–era horror and Anderson’s very loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland dominated the ceremony, “a much rarer situation than one titanic favorite enjoying a major sweep,” David Sims observes at The Atlantic. And their triumph signaled a break from the indie streak that defined the turn of the decade. Apart from Oppenheimer (2023), produced and distributed by Universal Pictures after Christopher Nolan ended his partnership with Warners, every Best Picture winner in the post-Parasite era—Nomadland (2020), Coda (2021), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), and Anora (2024)—came from outside the traditional American studio system. And with the exception of Everything Everywhere, produced by A24 to the tune of $25 million, these films were purchased by distributors after they were developed independently. If studios like Warners once dictated Hollywood’s output, the center of gravity has gradually shifted toward smaller industry disruptors.
Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025).
“For one night, at least, Warners’ dominance felt like a win for anyone who still believes in big-budget, auteur-driven filmmaking,” Miles Surrey argues at The Ringer. To put things into perspective, if Anora was made for “only” $6 million, One Battle required a staggering $130 million (plus $70 million for marketing), and Sinners $90 million. But this optimism might be short-lived, for this history-making night for Warners arrived just days after the studio accepted an astronomical $111 billion acquisition bid from Paramount. Granted, the merger still needs to be approved by regulators, but it’s poised to redraw the Hollywood map and rein in a legacy power player. Lest we forget, Paramount—led by CEO and Trump loyalist David Ellison—is taking on $79 billion in debt, a sum that will likely result in steep cuts to both personnel and slates, never mind that Ellison has vowed not to reduce production and committed to releasing 30 new films annually, fifteen from each studio. “Given the deal,” Manohla Dargis contends at The New York Times, “it is genuinely ironic that Sinners and One Battle made such a big noise last night.”
Since they were released to widespread critical and popular acclaim, their very existence has felt like a rebuke to the industry’s blockbuster-driven business model of the past few decades. For years, the major studios have made ever bigger movies while cutting back on the number of releases, which has been terrible for filmgoers and for theaters. I doubt strongly that’s going to change, no matter how many promises by David Ellison.
In a note to staff the day after the ceremony, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and President David Zaslav—who will personally receive over $550 million in compensation for the merger—said he “could not be prouder” of the company’s historic triumph, as Samantha Masunaga reports at The L.A. Times. “The films honored last night represent the very best of our company: bold creative vision, extraordinary craftsmanship, and the kind of storytelling that moves audiences around the world.” Will the studio remain as committed to artistically and politically daring movies under a chairman who’s boasted of his ties to the Trump administration? Or will Warners go the way of CBS, Paramount’s news division, which Ellison entrusted to self-declared “anti-woke” culture warrior Bari Weiss, who’s laid off staffers and shrunk the network’s operations ever since she was appointed editor-in-chief in October last year?
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025).
As funereal as these questions sound, the merger will not spell the end of the art form itself. Even if the last surviving studios appear increasingly unwilling to bet on bold, original filmmaking, it’s worth noting that several of the finest Oscar contenders this year were made a long way away from the United States, and relied on much smaller budgets than any of Warners’ awards juggernauts. One of 2025’s best, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, a blistering thriller set in 1970s Brazil, was made for an estimated $5 million, while Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s Nordic family saga, had a budget of approximately $8 million. Oliver Laxe’s techno-propelled ride through the deserts of Morocco, Sirât, was produced for €6,5 million, and though official figures for It Was Just an Accident haven’t been disclosed, it’s safe to assume that Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner, shot in secrecy and without permits in pre-war Teheran, must have relied on similarly modest funds. Crucially, the four were up for awards in several categories. All Best International Film nominees, they also vied for below-the-line prizes (Sirât was up for Best Sound), Original Screenplay (It Was Just an Accident and Sentimental Value), and several acting awards (Sentimental Value had contenders for Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Supporting Actor; The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura lost the Best Actor race to Michael B. Jordan).
That so many nominees were non-English-language titles is cause for celebration, and indicative of a trend that’s solidified since the start of the decade. Before Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite swept the board in 2020, only eight non-English-language films had been nominated for Best Picture—in the years since, at least one foreign-language film per year has made it into that slate. You could chalk that up to the Academy’s efforts to diversify and widen its membership. Just last year, Owen Myers notes at The Guardian, the organization expanded its ranks by forty percent: “approximately 45% of new invitees were people of colour, while 41% were women.” Of its eleven thousand members, 24 percent are now international, Anne Thompson observes at IndieWire. “Yet that explanation presupposes some strange, organized global Oscars mafia that exclusively votes for foreign-language films,” Kalle Oskari Mattila writes at the New York Times. “Instead, American cinema seems to be growing international—with crews chasing foreign tax rebates and first-generation immigrants stacking Oscar nominations—while international cinema (or at least the version of it reaching the United States) is Americanizing, too.” Evidence of these trends take different shapes: from international features that reference US classics (see the nods to Jaws in The Secret Agent) to American characters cropping up in far-flung locales (such as Best Supporting Actress nominee Elle Fanning in Sentimental Value). Sure, Hollywood may be weathering its umpteenth apocalyptic storm, but to reduce the fate of the entire art form to that of the US film industry is nothing short of myopic.
Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025).
And if last year’s ceremony pointed to a troubling asymmetry between the biggest winners and their box-office returns—movies nabbing Oscars weren’t drawing large crowds to theaters, the argument went—the critical and commercial success of 2026’s frontrunners paints a different picture. Sinners wasn’t just the night’s most-nominated title, but one of 2025’s most popular movies, with a global haul of $369 million. And though the $200 million it racked up worldwide might not be enough to cover its gargantuan production and marketing costs, One Battle “is still not only the biggest hit of [Anderson’s] career by nearly a factor of three,” Sam Adams argues at Slate—the director’s second highest grossing feature, There Will Be Blood (2007), bagged $76 million—but also “one of the highest-grossing original movies of 2025, with a cultural footprint to match.”
That’s more reason to rejoice, especially at a time when the medium’s cultural significance seems to be waning. Sure, cinema has had to wrestle with fears of obsolescence since its inception, but an overcrowded streaming landscape, shorter theatrical windows, and fewer studios now make it increasingly difficult for genuinely idiosyncratic films to drive the conversation. When Timothée Chalamet dunked on ballet and opera in a conversation with Matthew McConaughey for Variety just a few days before the ceremony—during which the actor claimed he did “[not] want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive even though … no one cares about this anymore’”—his comments, dismissive and ill-timed as they were, felt like an apt encapsulation of the kind of existential crises currently haunting the industry. But Hollywood “is also in an artistic crisis,” Angelica Jade Bastién suggests in a thought-provoking piece over at Vulture, and if films are indeed becoming niche it might well be because “they no longer apply to the public.”
Filmmakers like Christopher Nolan wax poetic about the importance of movie theaters and their ability to create an intimate communal experience that regular people can afford to attend. But I would pose some questions in response: Why should audiences continue to support American films when so few of them are worth the time or money it takes to watch them? What happens to an art form when common men and women, within major cities and beyond them, are unable to participate in it? Is its only recourse, then, to be funded by and made for the wealthy? If an art form in our current late-stage capitalist hell becomes viable thanks only to the good graces of moneyed benefactors, it will eventually curdle and die: aesthetically, existentially, and finally, materially.
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025).
If their success is anything to go by, Sinners and One Battle are two astonishing exceptions to that atrophy, meaningfully engaged as they are with the fears, joys, and contradictions of life in our troubled 2020s. “Should we be annoyed, dismayed, worried, jaded, or relieved that, at the second Oscars of the second Trump Administration, barely a month into a spuriously waged war on Iran, so many of the winners’ speeches steered clear of politics?” Justin Chang wonders at The New Yorker. Whatever your response, there’s no denying the increased level of scrutiny artists face in contemporary awards campaigns to defend and articulate their works’ politics. Even so, several titles this year felt so plugged into our flammable zeitgeist that whether or not a filmmaker had spelled out a given film’s themes in press interviews was somewhat beside the point. Indeed, “for all the mournful reserve of the stage business,” Richard Brody echoes from the same outlet, “the movies that were most celebrated exhibited neither political timidity nor artistic caution.” At the risk of simplifying things, that Anderson left the Dolby Theatre with the night’s most coveted statuette was in no small part a function of his film’s topicality. Lest we forget, One Battle was shot before the president began his second mandate, which made some of its images almost prophetic. “What Get Out did for the first Trump era,” Nate Jones writes at Vulture, “One Battle did for its deranged sequel—capture elements of a Zeit that hadn’t yet Geisted when the film was shot.”
This was evident on a pure surface level as multiple moments from the film anticipated the defining imagery of the second Trump era. A government goon squad terrorizing an American city, declaring war on immigrants and citizens alike. The terrifying blankness of James Raterman’s military interrogator. An underground resistance network powered by community ties and lo-fi technology. But it was equally true that, in his gonzo mock-Pynchonian way, Anderson had excavated the psychological subtext of Trumpism. The leathery, oddly jacked old men who make their gender hangups everyone else’s problem. A ruling elite whose utter ridiculousness exists alongside an ideology that’s indistinguishable from Nazism. Even throwaway lines about the “Bedford Forrest Medal of Honor” foreshadowed official efforts to rehabilitate the heroes of the Confederacy. All this gave OBAA a lightning-in-a-bottle quality that was potent enough to power the film through to the end of the season.
Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025).
Set in 1932 Mississippi, Sinners might not radiate the same cribbed-from-the-headlines energy, but it feels topical nonetheless. Coogler’s genre-bending fantasy—about Black twin brothers who purchase a juke joint in the South, then immediately have to defend it from hordes of white, Irish-folk-music-loving vampires—animates the many ways in which Black art is born from oppression and routinely cannibalized by whiteness. More broadly, it addresses a major fear that might hit unnervingly close to a merger-era Academy: that of the difficult compromises creatives must accept from the moneyed few with the resources to usher their art into the world. “One of the many things I admire about Sinners,” Amy Nicholson notes at The L.A. Times, “is its acknowledgment that artists, dreamers and visionaries like Coogler still have to exist within a system they might disagree with, possibly even hate.” (It’s worth pointing out that the director secured a landmark deal with Warners that will grant him the copyright and ownership of his film in 25 years.)
In the end, Sinners lost the Best Picture race to One Battle, and Coogler to Anderson for Best Director. But the film spent most of the awards race neck-in-neck with One Battle, and to read its record-breaking number of nominations as a self-congratulatory move on the part of the Academy strikes me as uncharitable. Still, considering that Coogler was edged out for the top awards, it’s worth retracing the genesis of the ceremony itself, as Angelica Jade Bastién and Maya S. Cade invite us to do in an illuminating piece at Vulture published before Oscar night.
The Oscars themselves were created in 1927 by MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer to pacify Tinseltown’s growing desire to support the labor of artists. As studios gulped down profits, talent below and above the line began to demand adequate shares of the pie. So the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was born as a mechanism to numb their ambitions and sow division among the labor force in Hollywood. “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them,” Mayer said. “If I got them cups and awards, they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted.” The ceremony has remained a smug political distraction ever since. In 1990, when an L.A. Times editorial questioned the Academy’s snubbing of Do the Right Thing, then-president Karl Malden wrote a letter to the editor: “The members of this academy have done more to combat racial hatred and racial misunderstanding than all the editorial writers in all the newspapers in the world.” […] Is it surprising that a practice that began as self-satisfaction for the studio system never turned into a sustaining apparatus for Black careers in film?
Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025).
It bears noting that, according to the USC Annenberg’s inclusion report, only six percent of all nominations between 1929 and 2024 went to people of color; for all the efforts to redress such asymmetries in the wake of 2016’s #OscarsSoWhite campaign, the Academy still has a long way to go if it wants to effectively broaden the range of voices that are celebrated each year. After all, the fact that searing works like The Secret Agent and It Was Just an Accident left the awards empty-handed “is a reminder of the Academy’s cultural myopia,” per Justin Chang at The New Yorker: “for all its efforts to diversify and internationalize its voting membership, the organization seems largely oblivious to the finest, most vital work being done by filmmakers outside of America.” Such insularity is nothing novel—and distributor spend also determines which films end up in the awards spotlight—but it feels especially short-sighted at a time when studios may find it harder than ever to bankroll projects like One Battle and Sinners. Which is why, instead of relying on the increasingly volatile successes of big-budget US cinema, we should advocate for a truly diverse and international definition of the art form, one that reflects how both the nominees and the Academy ranks are evolving.
Coincidentally, Anderson and Coogler both launched their careers as independent filmmakers at Sundance, the festival founded in 1978 by the late Robert Redford, whom the Academy reserved the last spot during a heartfelt In Memoriam segment. A lot has changed since then: Sundance will soon relocate from Utah to Colorado, for one thing, and independent filmmaking has had to wrestle with countless financial, technological, and material challenges. But for all the anxieties around its future, cinema has always found new ways to adapt to an ever-changing environment; great movies are still being made, and a careful look at the year’s nominees should dispel some of the gloom. What was so energizing about them was that “they were imperfect and weird and unpredictable,” Alissa Wilkinson writes at The New York Times; so many, including and especially the two frontrunners, “feel almost gleefully resistant to conventional Hollywood studio wisdom.”
The future is uncertain, at the movies and in the real world. Hollywood has real reasons to be worried about what comes next. But I suppose that’s why the producers last night chose Redford’s quote to end his In Memoriam tribute: “The glory of art is that it cannot only survive change, it can lead it.” Last year proved that cinema is alive and well, wherever the artists are allowed to do what they do best.