Hollywood hit rock bottom again this year, and the proof came gift-wrapped at the 98th Academy Awards. What used to be a celebration of art and storytelling has become a sermon for the converted, a spectacle where politics replaces imagination and moral posturing stands in for creative courage. Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film One Battle After Another, which swept nearly every award from the Golden Globes to the BAFTAs, as well as six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Casting out of 13 nominations, and stood as a monument to just how far the American film industry has fallen.
Writer Liel Leibovitz saw it coming. In his scathing review for The Free Press, titled “‘One Battle After Another’ Is Irredeemable,” he begins almost playfully, wondering, “What would I do if I were one of America’s greatest film directors?” He imagines becoming someone like Paul Thomas Anderson, an acclaimed director whose earlier works like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood once proved that Hollywood could still take bold risks.
Leibovitz muses, “A genius of Anderson’s magnitude, I reasoned, is surely looking around him and feeling nothing but revulsion for what has become of Hollywood. An industry that now mandates diversity and inclusion standards in order to be considered for its highest honor… is no place for anyone committed to art for art’s sake.” Then he imagines Anderson fighting back, crafting a fake masterpiece that panders to the leftist elite just to expose how predictable and empty their applause has become. “Morons,” he fantasizes Anderson shouting from the Oscars stage, “I can’t believe you fell for it… You’re what’s wrong with American culture.”
But fantasy gave way to disappointment. “Walking out of One Battle After Another, I realized that the cavalry wasn’t coming,” Leibovitz writes. “Anderson is just another mindless mediocrity now, thinking first about party lines and only then, if at all, about truth and beauty. It’s all over.” Yet he follows that bitter realization with hope: “Which, hallelujah, is very good news.”
Why good news? Because every time Hollywood has reached this same level of absurdity, churning out lifeless, ideological slop, it has also been the beginning of something better. Some of our readers may be old enough to remember how the entertainment giants of the 1950s were terrified by the advent of television. major studios like MGM, RKO, and 20th Century Fox panicked over television’s rise, which pulled audiences from theaters. They poured millions into oversized widescreen epics, biblical dramas, and musical extravaganzas meant to dazzle with spectacle
In 1955 alone, Hollywood suffered through at least 13 high-profile flops. MGM gambled on Esther Williams in the Roman-era aquatic musical Jupiter’s Darling, packed with chariot races and swimming scenes, only to lose over $2 million and end her box-office run; critics dismissed it as “water over the dam.” Lana Turner’s lavish biblical epic The Prodigal burned through fortunes on sets and costumes to become MGM’s “biggest and most embarrassing failure.” Howard Hawks’ Egyptian saga Land of the Pharaohs, with its pyramids and slaves, tanked hard and battered Warner Bros. amid soaring costs. Paul Newman’s debut in the biblical artisan tale The Silver Chalice bombed so badly he ran apology ads years later, a perfect symbol of hollow prestige.
The trend dragged on with 1956’s Around the World in 80 Days, a massive adventure that won Oscars yet barely broke even after heavy promotion and strained United Artists, and 1957’s all-star prophetic flop The Story of Mankind, which pitted good against evil amid nuclear fears but baffled audiences and lost big money. These disasters bankrupted projects and laid bare the studios’ error, since TV audiences craved real substance over mere scale. But out of that ruin came a new wave of filmmakers; Coppola, Scorsese, and others, who rebuilt American cinema through bolder films, with much smaller budgets and daring storytelling. By the 1970s, they’d restored both the soul and the spectacle of film.
Today feels eerily similar.
In One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio plays “the one nice white guy” in a country overrun by racists, forced into caring for a revolutionary’s baby and lecturing about gender pronouns. The movie’s worldview, and ostensibly the Academy’s and the director’s, is that modern America is now some sort of fascist state. This obviously mirrors the delusions of an industry convinced that half the country is evil. It’s also a symptom of what Sasha Stone at AwardsDaily calls “a group of insane people trapped inside a Doomsday cult.” Hollywood isn’t telling stories anymore; it’s preaching sermons to itself, which is why all of your TDS suffering friends and family members loved this movie, even though very few people actually saw it.
You see, much like those high budget flops of the 50’s that ended up ushering in a new, better era of films, One Battle After Another reportedly lost nearly $100 million dollars. Take solace in that. In past eras of greatness, the filmmakers answered to the audience, not to activist panels and DEI checklists. One Battle After Another comes during an era where the Oscars implemented a DEI mandate in 2024, so they’ve prioritized “the message” more than entertaining the audience. Once this mindset has expired, the Oscars and all their shiny trophies will feel like relics of a system that forgot who made all of this possible in the first place.
However, if history is any guide, though, this collapse won’t be the end of cinema. Somewhere right now, in a basement or a backroom editing bay, some young filmmaker is watching this sham of an era burn down and feeling more free than ever. Free to tell real stories again. Free to Make Hollywood Great Again.
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English (US) · 