When Robert Altman lost what would turn out to be his final shot at an Academy Award, he turned to one of his fellow nominees, David Lynch, and remarked, “It’s better this way.” At the time, Altman’s losing streak was one of the most impressive in Oscars history—a lifetime record of 0–7, including five nominations for Best Director and two for Best Picture. But in the years since Altman’s death in 2006, he has been eclipsed by his protégé Paul Thomas Anderson, who went into this year’s Oscars with zero wins out of 11 previous nominations for director, picture, and screenplay. Though there are famous below-the-line also-rans like Diane Warren, who notched her 17th loss for original song this year, Anderson’s was the most sustained Oscar losing streak of any writer-director in history. And while One Battle After Another’s commanding victories—six total wins, etc.—have finally brought it to an end, it took quite a while to get there. As Anderson’s longtime casting director Cassandra Kulukundis told Anderson from the stage when she won her Oscar early in the broadcast, “This is freaking insane. I have one before you, which is also crazy. I hope you get one tonight.”
Anderson got three in the end: for director, adapted screenplay, and picture. And the movie picked up three more, for casting, editing, and supporting actor. But it seemed to be Best Director that moved him the most. “You make a guy work hard for one of these,” he said to the crowd. And while he was generous to his fellow nominees, comparing this year’s Best Picture lineup to the Mount Rushmore of 1976—the year of Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, Barry Lyndon, Nashville, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—he acknowledged that it felt awfully good to finally be the one holding the statue. “I couldn’t ask for a better class,” he said to his fellow directors. “It’s an honor just to be counted among you guys.” And yet, he wasn’t so modest as to pretend he hadn’t wanted to be standing there for a long, long time. “There will always be some doubt in your heart that you deserve it,” he admitted. Still, he added, “there is no question at the pleasure of having it for myself.”
Altman, Anderson’s idol, was a Hollywood outsider, and when people asked if he resented the industry’s failure to embrace him, he channeled a life’s worth of frustration into a simple response: “They sell shoes, and I make gloves.” He wasn’t averse to making studio movies, or to embracing the kinds of elaborate productions that studio budgets could enable, but he was categorically incapable of making the kinds of broad, simplified gestures that would allow his movies to repay those budgets. (Few things are less crowd-pleasing than Altman’s version of Popeye.) Altman, like Lynch—and Hitchcock and Chaplin before them—was eventually awarded an honorary Oscar, the academy’s favorite way of atoning for careerlong oversights. But he knew, or at least accepted, that his real home was outside the tent.
For all that he took from Altman, Anderson never resigned himself to working on the margins. His movies have never been big box-office hits—before One Battle After Another, his biggest take was There Will Be Blood’s $76 million, and even One Battle’s $209 million is likely not enough for the lavish production to turn a profit. But his movies feel as if they ought to be bigger than they are. Sure, The Master is chilly and off-putting, Punch-Drunk Love anxious and abrasive, but Licorice Pizza’s shaggy coming-of-age tale might have packed theaters in an era more open to character-driven stories, one when Phantom Thread’s kinky romance might also have found an audience hungry for its offbeat pleasures. Until this fall, Paul Thomas wasn’t even the most successful Anderson of his generation: Wes’ The Grand Budapest Hotel outgrossed There Will Be Blood twice over, and he also took home his first Oscar, for live-action short, in 2024.
For me, the most illuminating means of understanding the Oscars is as the movie industry presenting its best face to the world—saying, effectively, This is what we do. The goal isn’t accuracy, which would entail a lot more recognition for the likes of Jurassic World: Rebirth and A Minecraft Movie, but aspiration, honoring the movies Hollywood wishes it still made rather than ones it actually does. Meager box-office returns aren’t an obstacle to Oscars success; they may even be an enticement. What better way to show that you still care about art than by casting a vote for some virtuous indie while you’re fielding calls about rebooting the Cabbage Patch Kids? But the one thing the academy can’t forgive is a flop. It’s one thing if your movie was never going to make any money, a different thing entirely if it should have and didn’t.
Looking back over Anderson’s track record, you can make a case for every individual loss. Of course Boogie Nights wasn’t going to beat Good Will Hunting for original screenplay, and of course The Shape of Water’s freaky fantasy would be easier to swallow than Phantom Thread’s freaky reality. There Will Be Blood was, and arguably still is, Anderson’s most obviously “awards-worthy” movie, a dark parable about America shot in a restrained but elegant style—a movie that wears its masterpiece-ness on its sleeve. But it had the misfortune to come along in the same year as No Country for Old Men, which was all those things and, arguably, more, plus Joel and Ethan Coen were “due” in a way that Anderson, more than a decade their junior, was not. Anderson, like the Coens in 2008, is in his 50s; Ryan Coogler, like Anderson then, is in his 30s.
Since the major influx of new voters post-2013, the academy seems less partial to the idea of bestowing career awards or fulfilling comeback narratives. (See, for example, Demi Moore’s loss to Mikey Madison in last year’s Best Actress race.) But it wasn’t just Paul Thomas Anderson’s turn. One Battle After Another was a genuine peak, his most personal movie, his most politically relevant, and his most concerted attempt at a popular entertainment since Boogie Nights, if not ever. It’s a showcase for one of the world’s biggest stars and a vehicle for one of the most promising newcomers in years, not to mention for standout performances from a handful of immaculately deployed non-actors. It has the tension of an action movie and the amiable looseness of Altman’s best ensemble pieces, staged with the understated craft of a veteran who’s no longer compelled to come up with showy sequences for the purpose of flaunting his technical command. (He’s also mellowed with age, or maybe learned from his mistakes and hasn’t devoted a portion of his awards campaign to talking shit about his competition the way he did the previous time he got this close.)
And while it may not have yet earned back its extravagant budget of at least $130 million, it’s still not only the biggest hit of his career, by nearly a factor of three, but one of the highest-grossing original movies of 2025, with a cultural footprint to match. It’s a buddy comedy, a father-daughter drama, and a conspiracy thriller in one, a movie of ideas and a slapstick farce, woven together with the kind of skill it takes a lifetime, or at least half of one, hopping between genres to pull off.
If there’s a reason why Anderson’s Oscar has proved so elusive for so long, it may be because he’s difficult to slot into a category or to build a familiar narrative around. He falls somewhere between studio craftsman and brand-name auteur, too big to be indie, too small for Hollywood. Even after dominating most of the precursor awards, Sinners’ late surge made One Battle After Another feel, if not like an underdog, at least like something other than a sure thing—a movie that had to win rather than being simply handed its awards. It ended up being less of a fight than expected, but One Battle’s victory felt as if it was earned, rather than simply foreordained. It wasn’t just Paul Thomas Anderson’s time. He made it his moment.