There are two surefire ways to win an Oscar as a great director. One is to make a movie that crowns you the undisputed king of Hollywood, conquering the box office and the critics alike—in other words, the Christopher Nolan way. The other is to put in so much strong, critically acclaimed work for so long that eventually, usually 10 or more years after your true prime, the Academy will reward you in part to right past wrongs—the Martin Scorsese way. Sunday night, Paul Thomas Anderson became the latest filmmaker to get the pseudo lifetime achievement Oscar when One Battle After Another won six awards, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture. It's not that One Battle is a bad movie or a lesser work, but it is one of those clear inflection points in a lengthy career, one that allowed the Academy to celebrate a director that it had mostly ignored up until now.
The Academy has always kinda worked like this, torn between crowning a new generation—seen this year with Michael B. Jordan winning Best Actor and Autumn Durald Arkapaw becoming the first woman to win Best Cinematography—and feting the older one for their years of service. As a fan of Anderson's work, I've long thought he was overdue for more recognition from the Academy. There Will Be Blood is his most obvious masterpiece and was well positioned to get him a statue, though it had the unfortunate luck to go up against the Coen brothers' similarly masterful No Country For Old Men. The Master won the Oscar of my heart, but it was much too strange and polarizing for the Academy's infamously bland taste. For Phantom Thread, his last true five-star film, the award-season narrative was more about Daniel Day-Lewis's one last ride than Anderson. To go back even further, Boogie Nights was one of those movies that marked him as a potential Oscar-winner in the future but, like The Master, was too out there for the Academy to award it in the moment, while Magnolia seemed designed to simultaneously chase and repel the Oscar.
As far as a late-period work goes, I maintain that One Battle is a rich text that can be thrilling and confounding all at once. In that way it does feel akin to The Departed, the one that finally got Scorsese his little gold man. They're two movies that show what's great about their directors as well as what can be frustrating, and I think both movies will only grow in critical estimation as time goes on.
Seeing Anderson so full of nerves every time he went on stage Sunday really drove home how much the moment meant to him, and just how long he's been waiting for this. The former wunderkind, now with a grey beard and dad glasses, has become an elder statesman and a defender of the legacy of film and Hollywood. When he, Scorsese, and Spielberg signed on as advisors for Turner Classic Movies a couple years ago, I remember thinking how strange it was for him to be part of that triumvirate. There was a time where he was the young renegade who famously bypassed film school, acting like he had already been born to make movies, aiming to storm the castle those other two had long resided in. Mike De Luca, the Warner Bros. exec who was probably the true biggest winner of last night's ceremony (at least if Paramount doesn't turn around and fire him), gave Anderson a budget in 1997 at New Line Cinema to make Boogie Nights, which announced Anderson as the next big thing and De Luca as his lifelong champion. But as a wise sage once said: Time makes you bolder, even children get older, and I'm getting older too. It is both heartening and kind of a bummer to see a director so key to my own development as a cinephile, critic, and artist now in line for late-stage accolades.
Of course, Anderson deserves the praise, and I'm happy for him, just like I'll be happy when Ryan Coogler wins 15 years from now (cool directors always win the screenplay Oscar first). But it's also a reminder that no matter how much the Academy changes and adapts to a changing standard, they will always remain out of step, and that the filmmakers of my youth are now in the old folks' line, awaiting lifetime achievements and career retrospectives and the classic backdoor Oscar that stands in for these things. At least Anderson also had the bonus of Teyana Taylor being his cheerleader. DDL can't give you that.
