Paul Thomas Anderson is 55. Not to make this an age thing, but it’s an age thing. PTA has been admired since Hard Eight premiered in 1996 and widely admired since 1997 when Boogie Nights threw him into popular recognition within American cinema. He’s been one of the brightest lights of American cinema for three decades now, and the Academy has already whiffed it MULTIPLE times with him. They blew it in 1999 with Magnolia, and again in 2007 with There Will Be Blood, arguably PTA’s twin masterpieces of the failing American experience. PTA has lost eleven Oscars over the years, with multiple fruitless nominations for writing, directing, and Best Picture.
PTA’s goose egg was sort ignorable 20 years ago, because he was young and hungry and working like he owed someone money, but then…time passed. As other films aged like milk, PTA’s work grew in stature, and even as past films loomed larger in the canon, his new work kept shaping and refining his oeuvre into something that truly stands out among his peers. But going back to 1999, Magnolia wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture, which was won by American Beauty that year. Do you know how f-cking embarrassing that is? It’s SO embarrassing for the Academy. American Beauty has aged like roadkill, it’s a prime example of the Oscars’ recency bias and how a glossy hit “prestige” film can be trash while some weird dark masterpiece lurks in the fringes to haunt your legacy forever. (Green Book is a more recent example of this phenomenon.)
And now, for the first time since Punch Drunk Love in 2002, PTA made something accessible. He made something the Palm Springs crowd can sit through. So yeah, “it’s his time” is working for PTA because it is actually way f-cking overdue. Now, this does perpetuate the cycle of the “makeup Oscar”, because they’re making up for oversights of 25 years ago, and yes, we are now putting Ryan Coogler into this exact position.
Because Coogler is, like PTA was, young and hungry, and his work is consistently among the very best of his generation; he has a voice and an eye no one else is matching, he’s telling stories that grip audiences, he’s peppering his work with Big Ideas and sticking the landing. And in 20 years, we probably will be having this exact conversation about Coogler, about the Academy whiffing it and then giving him an Oscar for a perfectly fine film that is, you know, not his BEST-best, but still very good because he’s incapable of making a bad film.
But after seeing how the Brits broke at the BAFTAs, I think PTA is running the table to the Dolby, where he’ll finally get his flowers, in the form of multiple Oscars: writing, directing, Best Picture. But Ryan Coogler won’t go home empty-handed, either, he’s now the clear frontrunner for Best Original Screenplay (they’ll reward his imagination before they reward his technical skill). It’s the downside of awards season, that there can be only one, because this year, between PTA and Coogler, two generations of America’s best filmmakers, is exactly when you wish everyone could go home a winner. But we kind of are all winners, because we got these two terrific films from these two terrific filmmakers. The awards grow dusty on shelves, the films are forever.
You can view the full list of BAFTA winners here.
