Please Please Please Do Not Let This Movie Win Best Picture at the 2026 Oscars

At the risk of receiving the same hate mail that graced my inbox after I took down The Godfather, I'm here with an 11th-hour plea. The Best Picture category for the 2026 Academy Awards is filled with amazing contenders and splashy names—Hamnet, Frankenstein, underrated Bugonia, Sentimental Value and the nearly unanimous favorite, Sinners. But there's one film I recently watched—and didn't finish—that could capture the win over Sinners. One Battle After Another simply cannot edge out Ryan Coogler's historical vampire horror tale...with all due respect to Leonardo DiCaprio.

The film has a cast of unsympathetic characters all operating in morally gray zones. DiCaprio's character, Bob, is a former extreme leftist revolutionary and current father who's much better at being a stoner than parent. Bob and his daughter are in hiding after his lover and fellow revolutionary, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), entered witness protection and ratted out her comrades. On the other side is Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a military colonel and high-ranking immigration official, with whom Perfidia had an affair. Lockjaw receives a highly-coveted invitation to join a White supremacist secret society, the Christmas Adventurers Club. This leads him to hunt down Bob's presumed daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), with the intention of murdering her if she ends up being his biological daughter.

I watched about 70 percent of this movie on a plane, and it was a relief when the wheels hit the tarmac and the screen went dark. It felt like too much of an approximation to what is actually happening in the real world for me to get lost in the story. The raid Lockjaw leads on a sanctuary city evoked Minneapolis, too on the nose. Art that is too on the nose is an instant turn-off for me, especially when it is also failing to further the conversation around the issue on which it is commenting. While the aim of the revolutionary group, French 75, is admirable, their means to achieve it are still deplorable. As they murder, humiliate, steal and assault their way to the cause, these actions make them no better than the nearly inhuman, cold-blooded government they're up against. They're the same people on different sides of a coin.

While there are plenty of comedic elements, I would have needed it to be full-blown satire in order to buy in. Instead, I was stuck watching Bob drink, smoke and generally bumble his way through a crisis while Lockjaw spewed vitriol and ruthless selfishness. My takeaway was the same as with The Godfather: Kill people who piss you off. And so with that, I will go to the mattresses.