Run for your life! The world, according to the Oscars
The Academy Award nominees for Best Picture are entertainingly frantic and defiantly political
A man on the run in a society turned upside down: that is the image of the world projected in this year’s Oscar nominees. Their heroes dodge injustice and prejudice, flights from danger and towards salvation that are frenzied and exhausting (even for audiences). At a time when some showbiz bigwigs fear offending the powerful, these films pack politics into rollercoaster stories.
During the Renaissance, some artists embraced a principle known as copia, or abundance. Depicting the wealth of creation, they thought, required richness, intricacy and variety. Today’s top directors seem to agree. Many of the titles are whoppers. “Sinners" (pictured) earned an all-time record 16 nominations; “One Battle After Another" has 13; “Marty Supreme" has nine: all are well over two hours long. One response to cinema’s box-office woes is evidently to offer more bangs for your buck.
Yet there are no longueurs here. “Sinners" is a fantasia about twin gangsters, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who open a juke joint in Mississippi in 1932; it is part musical and part horror flick, incorporating the Ku Klux Klan, shoot-outs, vampires and the blues. In “One Battle" Leonardo DiCaprio is chased relentlessly across cities, rooftops and deserts. “Marty Supreme" is a madcap caper about a table-tennis hustler (Timothée Chalamet) in the early 1950s, which features two competing love stories and a gunfight over a stolen dog.
These are overstuffed movies, careening through moods and genres—sports flick to bildungsroman, or thriller to Western. Together they convey a sense that, from today’s perspective, life is too mercurial and overwhelming to fit into neat formats or plots. It is also unfair.
“Wokeness" is said to be retreating nowadays; some media executives kowtow to the White House. By contrast these films are uncompromising, though they are also cunning, dressing argument in fantasy and period costume. “One Battle" is set in a parallel America where, as lawless militias hunt down immigrants, activists ponder how to resist. (Since the movie’s release last year, the gap between its dystopia and reality has rapidly shrunk.) The new “Frankenstein"—which also has nine nominations—gives its mythic narrative a political edge, too. The scientist depends on an arms dealer for his funding and battlefields for his corpses.
And though some politicians are trying to snuff it out, here America’s discussion of race is vivid and irrepressible. Segregation and exploitation stalk “Sinners" along with its ghouls. In “One Battle" the ultimate villains are a white-supremacist cabal. The striving hero of “Marty Supreme" is Jewish, and the world is not his friend, peopled as it is with corrupt cops, vicious hoodlums and bullying tycoons.
That film’s interest in Jewishness and antisemitism is underlined in a standout sequence. In a brief but haunting flashback, a concentration-camp survivor recounts smothering his body in honey to feed to fellow prisoners. The whole hysterically ping-ponging saga of “Marty Supreme" unfolds in the shadow of the Holocaust, this interlude implies. “Sinners" has its own daringly symbolic moment, in which a blues song conjures up the spirits of black artists past and future, from West African musicians to hip-hop DJs. In “One Battle" a hallucinatory car chase along a dipping road hints that its struggle is unending.
Crowd-pleasers that take artistic risks, such nominees deserve their success. They are also largely dominated by men, who do most of the frenetic running and fighting. (In “Frankenstein" a man even gives birth, kind of.) The old-fashioned template for screen heroism seems as unkillable as those vampires.
An exception to all this is “Hamnet" (eight nominations). Bucking the old rule about not working with children and animals, this is the story of William Shakespeare’s marriage, the birth of his offspring and the death of his son. The drama is staged in a narrow, muddy world of timbered houses, inglenook fireplaces, leather jerkins and rummaging livestock, with the odd boozy all-nighter and burst of iambic pentameter.
“Hamnet" looks through the other end of history’s telescope: its focus is not Shakespeare’s seismic career but domestic joys and tragedy. The real protagonist is his wife, here called Agnes and played by Jessie Buckley (a hot favourite for Best Actress at the ceremony on March 15th). Her wails in childbirth and after her boy’s demise are the film’s most piercing sounds. The quietness, too, distinguishes “Hamnet" in a noisy, frantic field. At this year’s Oscars, the rest is sirens.
© 2026, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com
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