In most years, the Best Picture race functions like a polite procession: a few respectable prestige dramas, a technical marvel or two, perhaps one crowd-pleasing juggernaut that reassures everyone the Academy still enjoys a healthy box-office narrative. These races feel less like debates than foregone conclusions, the outcome often legible months in advance. But once in a while, the competition tightens and sharpens, and the race stops being a ceremony and becomes something closer to a referendum—on taste, on values, on what we believe cinema is for.
This year’s pairing of Hamnet and One Battle After Another has produced exactly that sensation. These films are not merely competing for trophies. They are engaged in a sustained argument about how we process grief, how history inhabits the body, and how cinema itself might respond to a moment when the present feels both overcrowded with information and eerily thin in meaning. Together, they dramatize a cultural crossroads: one path inward toward mourning and communion, the other outward toward confrontation and reckoning.
What makes this race so provocative is not simply that both films are ambitious or critically adored—though they are—but that they operate in almost opposite emotional registers while circling the same existential terrain. Hamnet whispers. One Battle After Another confronts. One bends inward toward private loss; the other looks outward at collective struggle. And yet, taken together, they reveal a shared unease about time itself—about the way the past refuses to stay buried, how trauma echoes across generations, and how the present remains haunted by absences that feel newly urgent.
At first glance, Hamnet might seem an unlikely Best Picture frontrunner for the 2020s. It resists nearly every instinct that modern awards campaigns tend to reward. There are no rousing speeches designed for highlight reels, no grand political set pieces, no conventional narrative propulsion toward triumph or resolution. Instead, the film lingers. It pauses. It allows silence to become texture. Grief is not treated as a plot obstacle to be overcome, but as an atmosphere—something breathed in, something that subtly alters the chemistry of daily life.
The film’s power comes from its refusal to dramatize loss in obvious or sentimental ways. The death at its center is neither sensationalized nor folded into neat causality. There is no attempt to explain suffering into meaning. Instead, Hamnet attends to aftermath: the way a room feels emptier without announcing itself as such; the way a parent reaches instinctively for a child who is no longer there; the way language falters when confronted with the unbearable. The film understands that grief is not loud by default. More often, it is quiet, repetitive, and isolating.
In doing so, Hamnet asks something radical of its audience: patience. Not passive patience, but emotional attentiveness—the kind that requires viewers to meet the film halfway, to bring their own memories and associations into the space it creates. This is not a film that explains itself as it goes. It trusts that audiences are capable of sitting with ambiguity, of recognizing emotional truth without narrative signposts.
That trust feels particularly daring in an era of algorithmic storytelling, when films are increasingly engineered to hold attention through constant stimulus and escalating stakes. Hamnet risks boredom. It risks misinterpretation. It risks being labeled “too small.” And in doing so, it asserts that restraint itself can be a form of courage. In a culture that equates volume with importance, Hamnet insists that quiet can be radical.
Yet the film’s softness should not be mistaken for fragility. There is a fierce intelligence at work here, a deep understanding of how grief operates as both a personal and generational force. Hamnet is not only about a single loss but about how loss becomes encoded—into memory, into ritual, into art itself. Creation, the film suggests, is not a cure for grief but a companion to it. Art does not erase pain; it gives it shape, allowing it to be held rather than hidden.
What ultimately elevates Hamnet—and what makes its final moments feel so profoundly beautiful—is its insistence that grief does not have to remain internalized in order to retain its dignity. For much of the film, pain is private, almost cloistered. Loss is absorbed quietly, carried through routine, endured rather than articulated. The film honors that inwardness, refusing to rush its characters toward acceptance or meaning.
But in its closing movement, Hamnet makes a gentle yet radical turn outward. It suggests that grief, when shared, does not weaken—it connects. The ending reframes mourning as a communal act. In a public gathering of strangers, individual sorrow is neither solved nor explained, yet it is witnessed. And in that witnessing, a fragile, fleeting union forms. No one’s pain is erased. But it is recognized, and recognition itself becomes a form of release.
This moment resonates with particular force in a post-Covid world. For years, grief was experienced in isolation: funerals postponed or livestreamed, hospital rooms closed to loved ones, mourning fractured by distance and silence. The final moments of Hamnet feel like an answer to that collective rupture. They offer an image of people gathered together, breathing the same air, feeling something alongside one another again. The catharsis is not spectacular; it is communal. And that is precisely why it feels so necessary.
There is an added layer of meaning in the fact that this release occurs within a performance space. Moviegoing itself becomes part of the metaphor: strangers sitting together in the dark, united briefly by shared attention. Hamnet restores faith in cinema as a communal ritual at a time when that ritual has felt endangered. Its ending feels less like a conclusion than an invitation—to mourn together, to feel together, to remember that solitude does not have to be permanent.
If Hamnet is a murmur, One Battle After Another is a sustained exhale. It is a film animated by momentum—historical, emotional, moral. Where Hamnet compresses time into intimate fragments, One Battle After Another stretches it across decades, tracing the ripple effects of conflict long after the official end dates have passed.
The film’s central question is deceptively simple: what does it mean to keep fighting when the battle lines have shifted, when the enemy is no longer easily named, when victory feels abstract or perpetually deferred? Rather than offering tidy answers, the film presents struggle as cyclical, almost hereditary. Each generation inherits the unfinished business of the last, often without fully understanding the original terms.
What distinguishes One Battle After Another from more conventional historical dramas is its refusal to treat history as a closed book. The past is not something the characters visit—it intrudes. It shapes their bodies, their relationships, their moral reflexes. Trauma does not remain politely in the background; it leaks into the present, complicating ethical clarity and making heroism feel provisional rather than triumphant.
Stylistically, the film is restless. It moves between intimate character moments and broader social tableaux, creating a sense of constant recalibration. Just as viewers settle into one perspective, the film shifts, reminding us that history is never singular and progress is never linear. This refusal of narrative comfort mirrors the film’s thematic insistence that forward motion is uneven and often reversible.
Where Hamnet ultimately offers release, One Battle After Another withholds it. The film is angry—deliberately, unflinchingly so. It seeks to confront the questions many have been asking about the political and social climate of the past decade, and it channels an anger that has only intensified in recent years, particularly since November of last year. Crucially, it recognizes that this anger is not confined to one ideology. It exists on both sides of the political aisle, often for radically different reasons.
The film captures a paradox of the current moment: that outrage has become a shared emotional condition even as its causes diverge. Each faction believes something essential has been stolen—power, dignity, safety, truth. One Battle After Another refuses to mock or simplify these grievances, but it is unsparing in its depiction of their consequences. Polarization here is not merely disagreement; it is mutual incomprehension hardened into identity.
There is no grand reconciliation in the film, no speech capable of bridging the divide. Instead, One Battle After Anotherpresents anger as corrosive and self-perpetuating, a force that isolates individuals even as it mobilizes them. Its lack of catharsis feels intentional. The film understands that rage, once normalized, resists resolution. It can be expressed, redirected, examined—but not easily discharged.
In this way, One Battle After Another mirrors the emotional exhaustion of the present moment. It does not flatter its audience with easy moral clarity or comforting distance. Instead, it demands that viewers consider their own entanglement in ongoing struggles, to ask whether neutrality is ever truly neutral when the stakes are structural and historical.
What makes this Best Picture race so compelling is not which film is “better” in any objective sense, but how clearly they articulate a shared anxiety from opposite directions. Both films are haunted by absence. In Hamnet, the absence is personal and devastatingly specific. In One Battle After Another, it is collective—the absence of closure, of justice fully realized, of a clean break from the past.
Together, they suggest a broader cultural reckoning with time itself. We live in an era saturated with historical awareness—anniversaries, retrospectives, reboots—yet oddly uncertain about what to do with that awareness. Hamnet proposes introspection: look inward, honor the quiet truths that shape us. One Battle After Another proposes confrontation: look outward, challenge the structures that perpetuate harm. Neither path is presented as sufficient on its own.
This tension mirrors contemporary debates about art’s role in moments of crisis. Should art soothe or provoke? Should it bear witness or mobilize? The brilliance of this Best Picture race is that it refuses to resolve those questions. Instead, it stages them, allowing audiences and voters alike to grapple with their own expectations of cinema.
Historically, films like One Battle After Another, with their overt engagement with history and social struggle, fit comfortably within the Academy’s self-image as a moral arbiter. Films like Hamnet, by contrast, risk being dismissed as “too small,” “too quiet,” or “too literary.” And yet, recent years have shown a subtle shift in what prestige can look like.
There is growing recognition that restraint can be as radical as spectacle, that emotional precision can carry as much weight as thematic scale. A win for Hamnet would signal an embrace of vulnerability as cinematic virtue—a willingness to honor films that trust silence as much as speech. Conversely, a victory for One Battle After Another would reaffirm cinema’s capacity to confront the unfinished business of history without nostalgia or false comfort.
Neither outcome feels safe. Both would mark a statement, a vital statement for our culture in 2026.
Decades from now, the specifics of who won which award may blur, but races like this one tend to linger. They become shorthand for moments when the industry paused to consider itself. The Hamnet versus One Battle After Anothershowdown is not just about two films; it is about two philosophies of engagement.
Hamnet argues for the sanctity of interior life in a world that constantly demands performative clarity. One Battle After Another insists that history is not content but context. Together, they articulate a cinematic crossroads. Do we turn inward to understand ourselves more fully, or outward to change the world more effectively?
The answer, of course, is that we need both. And perhaps that is the most provocative implication of this race: that cinema, at its best, does not choose between introspection and action, but holds them in productive tension. In an industry often accused of playing it safe, this Best Picture race feels unusually alive. It reminds us that film can still surprise us—not just with what it shows, but with what it asks of us.
In the end, what makes this race feel so essential is that both films dare to offer hope without defining it. Chloé Zhao and Paul Thomas Anderson refuse to tell us exactly what we are meant to take away from their final moments—whether what lingers is recognition, reconciliation, the first fragile step toward healing, or something more ambiguous and unresolved. That uncertainty is the point. I shed a tear at the conclusion of One Battle After Another, struck by the weight of its anger and the possibility—however faint—that awareness itself might be a form of forward motion. I openly wept in the final moments of Hamnet, overwhelmed by its faith in shared grief as a bridge between strangers. Together, these films frame a Best Picture race that feels less like a competition than a reckoning. They remind us, urgently, that art is not merely an escape from the fractures of our world, but a means of enduring them—that in a polarized age defined by isolation, outrage, and loss, cinema remains one of the few spaces where we can still feel together, argue together, mourn together, and survive together, emerging stronger in the end.
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