[crabkin]

The obvious political stance of One Battle After Another notwithstanding, given how much the film succeeds as an exercise in using the language of cinema to tell a compelling story, it comes across (ironically) as idealogically motivated to say the movie isnt nominated in part for its merits with regard to craft and construction.

No doubt it appeals to people at the Academy in its persuasion, but if we were to strip it down to film technical aspects it would no doubt still be a frontrunner for film of the year.

[hitekker]

Your first sentence is confusingly worded. Do you mean the GP is ideological for saying the movie is unpopular? Or that he's ideological for saying the movie isn't good?

I haven't seen the movie in question but it looks like it underperformed pretty badly (-$90M) at the box office.

[crabkin]

As if box office is a proxy for quality. I seriously question whether your comment is made in good faith to begin with, are you intentionally misunderstanding me?

Their assertion that "It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good," just flat out doesn't hold under scrutiny. Why? Consider that there is a lineage of people who are essentially writing statements using a language "of the screen," people like Hitchcock, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Scorsese, to name a few. No matter what the film is ``about," the person crafting the film must grapple with the same things: how do I order the events? How does this work psychologically? Is this coherent? Does this say what I want it to? And such concerns scale down to very practical problem-solving on the day-to-day so that the vision may be best served.

Whether you agree with the values the film espouses or not, it succeeds as a work of cinema, full stop. That's true even if it was never shown in a theatre. People who work in the film industry know that, which is why the Oscars isn't precisely a "what is the wokest film" contest every year. Therefore if you assert it's just "preaching" correctly that is basically reducing something that has enormous value in terms of craft into just "messages;" ironically, you are doing so because you can't see past "messages."