The Academy Awards are not what they were; the movies are not what they were. Yet apart from memes and TikTok clips, cinema remains the only mass art form capable of giving us a window into the American psyche, a spiritual temperature check, a foretaste of the future. The death of the rom-com is connected to the decline of sex and marriage; the entire woke era was anticipated when The Shape of Water won Best Picture; the age of AI is rolling down tracks laid by The Terminator and The Matrix. So when the Oscars come round, I can’t help myself: I sift through the nominees and winners, ponder the non-nominees, and try to cast an augury.
This year it felt easier than usual, since the leading Best Picture contenders were embodiments of America’s contending ideological worldviews. The most explicit was the ultimate winner, One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Trump-era revision of Thomas Pynchon. It embodies “resistance” liberalism, which is really Boomer liberalism, in a pure and illuminating form.
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