sean penn

In “Worst Best Picture” we search every single Best Picture Oscar winner of all time from 1927 to present to uncover the worst of them all. Conventional wisdom says that 2005’s winner Crash is the worst winner in history. We won’t stop until we’ve tested every last one. Read the the first, our review of Crash, here. Posts will be relatively spoiler free, but there may be some details revealed. Today’s installment is the 2026 winner One Battle After Another. Is it better than Crash?

This series has become a review of the Oscars as much as it is a discussion of the Oscar-winning film of the year. One Battle After Another, the heavy favorite, won this year, and really the only drama to that is that people also really liked Sinners. Last year’s winner was a big shock (at least to me, even though I liked Anora) and this year’s was not. At first blush, there’s not much to say about it. Paul Thomas Anderson finally got his Oscars, even if most people probably think he should have won them for something else. It’s a The Departed situation. 2026 will be remembered for the two big films at the top and most people, seemingly, think the right one won.

This is the first year I watched all 50 films nominated: 15 short films, 5 documentaries, and 30 features. Almost everything nominated this year was at least worth watching, with exceptions of the latest Jurassic World/Earth/Place which is boring, the third Avatar which is just more Avatar, Elio which is fine enough but feels neutered from what it could have been, and The Lost Bus which is a mess of an attempt to dramatize a real event that would have been more interesting without all the added fictional drama.

Compared to most years, this is a surprising accomplishment. We aren’t too far removed from Blonde and Hillbilly Elegy, two of the worst big-release films of the decade, being nominated for big awards. The worst serious contender this year is Apple’s obvious attempt to buy some Oscars with F1, which is a shallow, overlong sports cliche film with really depressingly underwritten female roles and just about nothing new to say. But as middling as F1 is, it does what it aims to do and it isn’t a disaster. That’s not always a given for the Oscars, and the worst you can really say about it is what Conan O’Brien said during the broadcast when he called it, offhandedly, “a popcorn movie.”

A core question I have been trying to get at in this series is: What are the Oscars supposed to be? Everyone probably agrees, broadly, that F1 is not “an Oscar movie.” But is that because it’s kind of dumb and an obvious attempt to cash in on a trend? Or is it because people went and saw it in the theaters and it made money? What is it specifically that makes Train Dreams an Oscar movie but makes you scratch your head at Frankenstein?

The Academy seems to have fully killed their very bad idea of a category for “Box Office Achievement” or whatever that was going to be, but now we seem to be at a half measure. A Lord of the Rings movie might win the top prize or it might be a movie about imagining yourself as a superhero or sleeping with a fish man. For as concrete as we imagine the idea of “an Oscar movie” to be, it doesn’t actually end up that way all the time. That’s why I find it so interesting that this year’s top films aren’t the contemplative look at a quiet life in the woods or the retelling of a classic story of loss or the slightly fictionalized sad tale of a musical lyricist. All of those were nominated and some of them won other awards, but the two big ones were essentially action movies, albeit ones by directors with some serious chops and reputations.

I liked Sinners and I loved One Battle After Another, but as with most years, even though I love the winner I wouldn’t have picked it. My two favorite films of the year were The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value. There was a surprising amount of buzz around The Secret Agent given it’s a relatively quiet, strange film about a man’s search for the truth in a corrupt world, but I think it helps that Wagner Moura is extremely handsome and charming. There was less buzz around Sentimental Value which obviously never stood a chance but did have four nominations across the acting awards and is, for my money, the best film of the year. It joins the director’s other recent film, The Worst Person in the World on that list. Both films are modern masterpieces and I cannot recommend them enough.

But to the point, One Battle After Another rules. It rules that a movie that’s this funny and this relevant has near-universal acclaim and won an Oscar over another monumentally successful and beloved film and created very little controversy in doing so. We follow Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob after the fictional (but realistic) terrorist group the French 75 implodes following a heist gone wrong. He has a teenage daughter by way of another member of the group who disappeared into witness protection (and then Mexico), played excellently by Teyana Taylor. In the present, the surviving members of the group have to avoid the Oscar-awarded Sean Penn’s evil Colonel Lockjaw as he hunts down who he wasn’t able to kill with the information from informant and “rat” Perfidia, Taylor’s character.

There’s more to it than that, but it is a story of revolution and resistance that requires you to think one level deeper. I am genuinely surprised there hasn’t been more capital-D Discourse from people insistently misunderstanding the message, but maybe that’s me assuming the worst of folks. Perfidia believes herself to be the only true revolutionary, especially as Bob (not his real name, but let’s try to be consistent) pulls back once they have a child together. Perfidia represents so many elements of resistance, not just as a form of villain in the film, but as someone who can’t see herself as multiple things. She is a mother, yes, but her need to form the world into a better place through violence feels, to her, like the best thing she can do for her daughter. We see otherwise and we see where she’s making the wrong choices, but we can see how she came to the place she came to given what she’s up against.

As a viewer, it’s easy to be disgusted by her choice to inform on the group and get actual revolutionaries killed. Is this solely a selfish act that endangers even her own child to save herself? Sure, and it’s easy to see that as villainous. But it’s also what she feels like is the only option available to her and it’s what allows her to ultimately escape. If she thinks her own actions are the only true revolutionary ones, she’s staying true to her own twisted code. It’s the wrong choice, but it’s an explainable one, through that specific lens.

It’s not a huge spoiler to say that we see a few actual, real-deal revolutionaries in this movie who are much more interested in getting things done than telling everyone around them how much more revolutionary they are than everyone else. That is the message: The work is more important than the credit. That’s something that resounds way beyond the specific lives of Bob and Perfidia and their struggles with Lockjaw. It’s a really fascinating undercurrent to the movie that still sticks with me now.

Everything else here is hilarious, from the fictional (but, again, realistic) secret society of power brokers who seemingly worship Christmas and Santa Claus to the straight-out-of-Lebowski version of Bob that Leo is playing as he bumbles through a world where people revere who he was in the movement even as he obviously is something much less useful today. The performances are incredible, down to the supporting cast like a military interrogator who noticeably has no patches or identification on his uniform (which carries an extremely sinister suggestion) who is played by an actual interrogator. “Oh, no jokes now?” he says, after threatening someone in a locked room, coolly and confidently, in a way that we all know happens every day and choose not to think about.

For my money, that’s why One Battle deserved to win this year even if I think a few movies were better. There is absolutely no more appropriate movie for “the moment” than a movie about a world we all would rather not consider but are being forced, perhaps thankfully, on a long enough timeline, to contend with on the news every single day. PTA said at the Oscars that this movie is about a world that his generation has made worse and has handed to a younger generation that has to deal with it. We see that in One Battle, as almost all of the young characters live in a world they feel no control over and no safety in. Not everyone will be hunted by a sinister military killer with an axe to grind, but everyone will be impacted by a world that rewards his behavior and punishes people who resist it. If you consider how you can push back on that idea, even if you might not necessarily get credit for it, then maybe the Oscars do mean something this year.

The Best Part: Sean Penn, who I do not like, is unforgettable as Lockjaw. His delivery, his mannerisms, his rage that you feel in every small decision, it’s just an all-time role.

The Worst Part: It’s an effective piece of the film, but the opening exchange between Perfidia and Lockjaw with a very obvious, very memorable joke moment, feels almost too wacky to be part of this. I said something similar about Everything Everywhere All at Once, and I think it’s a me problem that I’m overly sensitive to wacky sex jokes. The Christmas Adventurer stuff is all played so straight that it works better for me even when it is super wacky.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Once again, we clear this bar easily. I think there’s a legitimate case that The Lost Bus is a worse movie, though that would be something I’d have to think about. It’s certainly lazier, at least. I don’t think anything else this year would really be in the running. The worst thing I saw all year, and maybe the worst movie ever made, was the pandemic-driven War of the Worlds remake that featured a Staples “easy button” and so much product placement for big tech companies that it is a genuinely evil film more than it is a bad one. It is absolutely worse than Crash, but it almost feels like it was made as rage bait more than anything else. I’ll be sad if the Oscars doesn’t nominate any bloviating stupid bullshit next year. Stuff like Maestro and Blonde is the closest we get to dethroning the king.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or leave a comment on this page.

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Worst Best Picture: Is One Battle After Another Better or Worse Than Crash?