And the Oscar goes to…
Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” struck audiences with strong storytelling, intense action, and relatability within these unpredictable times, winning a grand total of six awards Sunday, March 15, at the 98th Oscars awards.
This is Anderon’s first time winning an Oscar after going 28 years with many nominations but no wins. Anderson, 55, snagged awards for best adapted screenplay, an achievement in film editing, and, most notable of all, best picture winner, closing out the night.
Actor Sean Penn, a no-show at the ceremony, won best performance by an actor in a supporting role. Cassandra Kulukundis, the film’s casting director, took home an achievement award in casting.
With large titles such as “Frankenstein,” “Sinners,” and “Hamnet,” “One Battle After Another” proved to dominate the 2026 Oscars with its originality and spirit.
“What a night!” Anderson said. “You guys, let’s have a martini.”
He proceeded to close after his acceptance speech, “This is pretty amazing. Cheers. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.”
Surrounded by cast and crew, Anderson threw out names he had forgotten to mention whilst giving thanks: “I really blew it when I won a best director award and I forgot to thank my cast. Leo, Benicio, Teyana, Sean, Regina. And especially Chase, my American girl, Chase. You are the heart of this movie.”
The story follows Pat “Ghetto” Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), who are lovers and members of a revolutionary group called the French 75. They break into Otay Mesa Detention Center to free detained immigrants — the group’s main motives.
Perfidia humiliates the commanding officer, Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who then becomes obsessed with her. Perfidia gives birth to a daughter, Charlene (Chase Infiniti), and abandons Pat and Charlene for revolutionary activities.
Sixteen years later, in Baktan Cross, California, Pat and Charlene assume new identities under Bob and Willa Ferguson, where their new life is thrown into turmoil as Lockjaw seeks out the members of the French 75. Chaos ensues.
The plot is inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland.” In the early 2000s, Anderson wanted to adapt the novel and eventually incorporated his own stories into the narrative while writing the screenplay. On Sept. 7, 2025, Anderson screened the film at the DGA theater in Los Angeles, following a conversation with Steven Spielberg.
“Well, the core of the story is a great one. It’s an ex-revolutionary (who) ends up in the woods raising a daughter, and the past is going to come back and haunt him. There’s a similar love triangle in that story as well,” said Anderson following the screening in Los Angeles.
“And I loved that book. I loved it and I loved it so much that I thought about adapting it. But the problem with loving a book so much when you go to adapt it is that you have to be much rougher on the book to adapt it. Then when I had a lot of other pieces, some other stories, I started to combine them. And I kept the things that I loved the most about the book, and the things I loved the most about the father-daughter story.
“I think even before I had kids, I kind of felt a connection to how this father felt about his daughter. And it only grew deeper and stronger as I have had kids to understand what he was writing about in that way. And I’m trying to take from the book what I needed and pursue my own path and let it move in directions that it seemed it wanted to go,” said Anderson.
This isn’t the first time Anderson has adapted a novel into film — in 2014, he adapted another Pynchon novel, “Inherent Vice,” (2009), into a movie with the same name. 2007’s “There Will Be Blood” was based upon the first 150 pages of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!” And “The Master” (2012) was influenced by yet another Pynchon novel, 1963’s “V.“
Casting played a ginormous part with “One Battle After Another.” From the opening scene of Otay Mesa Detention Center, we’re introduced to Taylor’s Perifidia Beverly Hills. Her powerful presence transdescends beyond screen, commanding not only her fellow French 75 members, but the audience, as well. Though Taylor’s role as an actress is relatively new — following her 2023 breakthrough role as Inez in “A Thousand and One,” earning the National Board of Review Award — she was previously known best for her award-winning choreography and Grammy-nominated R&B albums.
We are then introduced to DiCaprio’s Pat “Ghetto” Calhoun, who is perceived as an almost mouse-y, yet dedicated revolutionist, providing Taylor’s character with ammunition and explosives. We all know how well DiCaprio can deliver character in each of his films, but in “One Battle After Another” we get to see a vulnerability that wasn’t there before. Pat (or Bob, under a new identity) is a stoner throughout the entire runtime of the movie, yet he is dedicated to finding his daughter with every fiber of his being, and it shows. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill action hero fighting for a revolution, this is DiCaprio’s brilliance as Bob.
The actress playing Bob’s daughter, Chase Infiniti, went through a six-month audition process before landing the role of Willa Ferguson. She underwent various readings with DiCaprio and Regina Hall to determine the chemistry between actors, as well as training in both karate and mixed martial arts to test her readiness to do stunts and handle intense scenes with actor Sean Penn.
“They felt like the coolest kind of masterclass. I remember leaving the room thinking, ‘I would love this part, but even if I don’t get it, I’ll take that with me forever,” said Infiniti in an interview with Screen Daily.
Cinematography plays a vital role in a film’s production, and “One Battle After Another” is unique in that retrospect. The movie was shot by Michael Bauman on 35mm film using VistaVision cameras. VistaVision was primarily used in the 1950s, with notable films such as “Vertigo” (Hitchcock) and “White Christmas” (Curtiz) utilizing it, as well as later films such as the “Star Wars” trilogy. However, lately the use of VistaVision has not only been used in “One Battle After Another” but in a couple of other modern films such as “The Brutalist” (2024) and “Bugonia” (2025).
This is Bauman’s third collaboration with Anderson, following “Phantom Thread” (2017) and “Licorice Pizza” (2021).
Another one of the most notable takeaways from a film is the soundtrack. In “One Battle After Another” the melodies and sporadic piano scrawls blend seamlessly with the unrelenting action and tension. The score was composed by none other than Radiohead‘s Jonny Greenwood, marking his sixth time collaborating with Anderson. Greenwood wrote the music based on the unfinished script, and played the film during production so that the team could understand the tone of the overall project.
Some of the pieces centered around Steely Dan’s 1972 song “Dirty Work,” because of its rhythm and melody being particularly acute. Other tracks include “Soldier Boy” by The Shirelles and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” by Ella Fitzgerald.
“Jonny’s music is always unique and special,” Anderson said during a press conference in Los Angeles. “We got a sneak peak of where this was going, what the tension was going to be, and what we needed to sustain, so it’s a tremendous luxury to work like that, and it’s because Jonny is steps ahead of us,”
Overall, “One Battle After Another” received overwhelmingly positive criticism from an abundance of sources and critics alike, with Rotten Tomatoes providing a whopping 94% and The Guardian, with a five-star rating, calling it “at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen — an acquired test, yes, but addictive.”
In a society overwhelmingly abundanced with the takeover of ICE, “One Battle After Another” is a call for acknowledgement, for action; intertwined with the ingenious, hilly car chase maneuvers and frolicking apartment building getaways lies a sickening recognition that the white supremacist group introduced in the film (Christmas Adventurers Club) is far too reminiscent of the world we live in today.
“One Battle After Another” is available to stream on HBO Max, Hulu, The Roku Channel, and Youtube TV with subscriptions.
At a glance:
- “One Battle After Another” was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro, and Regina Hall
- The film won six awards at the 2026 Oscars including best picture, best adapted screenplay, an achievement in film editing, best performance by a supporting actor, and an achievement in casting.
- Michael Bauman, director of cinematography, used VistaVision cameras, which have not been utilized often since the 1950s.
- “One Battle After Another” was released on September 26, 2026 with a 94% in Rotten Tomatoes and a runtime of 2h and 42m, and grossed 209.6 million worldwide.
- The film was based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland.”
- Steven Spielberg has seen the film three times already, noting, “What an insane movie, oh my God. There is more action in the first hour of this than every other film you’ve ever directed put together. Everything, it is really incredible.”
