Is the Best Picture Race Already Over?

Ratings are down. Cultural prestige? Sinking as we speak. Yet the Best Picture race is one even casual movie fans tend to track. It’s the night’s biggest honor, and having a Best Picture logo next to a film title still holds some sway in the culture.

That’s even though most people didn’t see, or can’t remember, the last few Best Picture winners.

And, each awards season, experts track which film has the best chance to win that Oscar trophy. It’s the ultimate horse race, with box office results, critical reviews, and cultural resonance influencing the outcome.

Is this year’s race over already, weeks before some Oscar-bait films have even reached theaters? It sure looks that way.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” stars Leonardo DiCaprio and has already won multiple honors, and the awards season has barely begun. The film swept the National Board of Review’s 2025 honors, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor (DiCaprio).

That’s in addition to best picture wins with the Atlanta Film Critics Circle, the Gotham Awards, and the New York Film Critics Circle. The film also scored big with Sight and Sound’s 2025 Best Films Of The Year List, topping its 2025 chart.

More will follow, no doubt.

Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures – copyright Warner Bros. Pictures

“One Battle After Another” stars DiCaprio as a bumbling protester who hangs up his revolutionary jacket to raise his mixed-race daughter (Chase Infiniti). His radical past comes back to haunt them when a racist, out-of-control Colonel (Sean Penn) tracks his daughter down for nefarious purposes.

It doesn’t take Peter Falk’s iconic Columbo to sleuth out why “One Battle After Another” is generating so much critical adoration. Yes, Anderson is a top-tier filmmaker, and some of the sequences in the film prove exhilarating.

The film’s political point of view is pure catnip to a community wedded to progressive ideals. The story’s heroes are anti-government radicals who will do whatever it takes to free illegal immigrants taken into U.S. custody.

If that means holding U.S. officials at gunpoint, setting off fireworks, or bombing buildings, so be it. The U.S. forces shown throughout the film are almost uniformly cruel, callous, or just plain evil. A subplot involving a White Nationalist group feels too extreme even for your average MS NOW anchor.

It wasn’t for movie critics, apparently. They’ve endlessly praised the film to the tune of a 94% “fresh” rating at RottenTomatoes.com. The general public liked it, albeit less, via an 85% “fresh” score.

Some scribes have tried to downplay the film’s far-Left politics, a funnier take than any late-night monologue.

Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures – copyright Warner Bros. Pictures

It helps that no other 2025 release has “Best Picture” written all over it. Director Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet” is getting early raves, but the film has barely registered at the box office ($1.7 million to date) and offers a maudlin subject. The film imagines what William Shakespeare and his wife endured after the loss of their son.

The Boss biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” flopped in theaters and didn’t get enough critical love.

Art remains subjective, but Hollywood politics are another matter. Not only does “One Battle After Another” reflect the industry’s hard-Left embrace of open borders, it’s a thumb in the eye to both ICE and President Donald Trump.

The latter will be irresistible to Academy voters. And, chances are, the film’s key stars will lean into that sentiment during awards season.

The various arts honors do more than help predict which films and actors will emerge triumphant on Oscar night. They let the early winners test out their acceptance speeches, another unwritten part of their Oscar campaigns.

Uncork a few fiery “thank you… and” speeches, hitting all the “approved” targets along the way, and a star’s Oscar chances perk up.

Now, imagine what DiCaprio would say at the Oscar podium while collecting his second Best Actor statue for “One Battle After Another.” He used his 2017 podium time to promote his Climate Change agenda.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

There’s less than zero chance he won’t blast President Trump’s attempt to enforce immigration laws in any 2026 speech. And he won’t be alone.

Recent Oscar ceremonies have dialed back, to a degree, on the hard-Left polemics. Even far-Left host Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t leaned into his progressive bona fides in recent years.

That will change in 2026 after a full year of President Trump’s return to the White House. Is there a better film to reflect that “resistance” than “One Battle After Another”? That’s rhetorical.

We still have a few more weeks before the year ends. Films like “Marty Supreme,” starring perennial Oscar-bait Timothee Chalamet, hit theaters on Christmas Day. Still, anyone who grasps Oscar culture knows a heavy favorite when he or she sees one.

There is one dark path forward that could derail “One Battle After Another.” The film’s gauzy framing of violence against immigration enforcement took an ugly turn when real attacks on ICE agents broke out close to the film’s release.

The September attack on a Dallas-based ICE facility didn’t kill any U.S. agents, but it did leave two illegal immigrants dead. The media complex didn’t connect the attack to “One Battle After Another,” but if similar events follow, the connection may be unavoidable.

Hollywood may want to shrug off any ties between the film and actual carnage, but it might be enough of a problem to coax Oscar voters to select another, less incendiary film.

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Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic, and editor of HollywoodInToto.com. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at HollywoodInToto.com.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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