The Best Picture Winner's Often a Sign of the Times. This Year More So

Mar 12, 2026 9:05am PT The Oscar Best Picture Winners Have Long Been a Sign of the Times. This Year Even More So Whichever one ends up winning, "One Battle After Another" and "Sinners" are movies that take the temperature of our moment. By Owen Gleiberman Plus Icon Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic @OwenGleiberman Latest The Oscar Best Picture Winners Have Long Been a Sign of the Times. This Year Even More So 3 minutes ago ‘Reminders of Him’ Review: The Latest Colleen Hoover Movie Is a Pleasingly Restrained Weeper About the Passion of Motherhood 1 day ago ‘Project Hail Mary’ Review: Ryan Gosling in a Lavish but Derivative Outer-Space Adventure 2 days ago See All Courtesy of Warner Bros. The Oscar for best picture goes to the best picture (or, at least, a certain collective idea of it). Yet there’s another way to read that most defining and crucial of Oscar categories. If you look back at the best picture winners from years past, they will often tell you a great deal about what was churning around in the culture — the themes and passions and rocky incarnations of what was once called the zeitgeist (a term that fell out of the zeitgeist, but we’ll use it anyway). Related Stories 'Bridgerton' Season 4 Boss on Benedict and Sophie's Happy Ending, That Post-Credits Scene, New Whistledown Mystery and Why She Won't Recast Daphne and Simon How Netflix's 'One Piece' Season 2 Brought Iconic Manga Character Tony Tony Chopper to Life “The Godfather” and its majestically dark sequel cast their grand shadow over the first half of the ’70s. Their dual Oscar wins for best picture expressed, among other things, a national reckoning with the idea that America had become a land of corruption. (In the “Godfather” films, the activity of the Mafia wasn’t just crime — it was a metaphor for capitalism.) “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979) caught the lacerating social change wrought by the age of divorce. “Chariots of Fire” (1981), with its stiff-upper-lip reverence, embodied the return to “traditional values” of the Reagan era, while “Forrest Gump” (1994) captured how history itself was becoming, in our minds, a form of virtual reality. “Parasite” (2019) tapped the gap between the haves and the have-nots that has become a defining perception of our age. Popular on Variety But even given all that, this year’s Oscar for best picture has the potential to be seen not simply as a reflection of the times but as a referendum — and, in tandem, an assertion of the holy piercing relevance of cinema. For if there has ever been a moment since World War II that conjures the expression “May you live in interesting times,” it is this one. We are now living, breathing, gasping, drowning in interesting times. It’s only fitting that the movies — and the Oscars — reflect that. The race for best picture has come down to a contest between two films: “One Battle After Another,” with its uncanny evocation of the looming authoritarianism of the Trump era, and “Sinners,” a vampire drama that’s really an immersive plunge into the Deep South of the ’30s, a place defined by the intertwined demons of racial segregation and racial violence. It is not the purpose of this column to predict which movie has the edge. But this much can be said. If “One Battle After Another” wins, it will play as an affirmation of the power of movies to tap our most traumatic social and political anxieties and elevate them to a cathartic place. There may be no Oscar winner in history that has owned the zeitgeist like “One Battle After Another.” That said, when “Sinners” came out close to a year ago, it was a blockbuster that jolted audiences like a shock of lightning. With its heady themes of forbidden love and Black entrepreneurial ambition, the genius of the blues and the appropriation of the blues (expressed by vampirism), all tangled up in a deal with the devil, “Sinners” wasn’t just a horror-thriller parable of race in America. It was a boiling cauldron of dreamscape relevance. If it wins on Oscar night, that will only affirm what an unforgettable chord it struck. As seen through the lens of Academy Awards night, both of these films reflect a new model of what a Hollywood political movie can be. Whatever your opinion of “Green Book” (2018), it was the last true Old-Fashioned Liberal Message Movie to win the Oscar for best picture. And that, in a way, is what the controversy it provoked was all about. Old-fashioned liberals thought “Green Book” was fine and dandy; newfangled progressives thought the movie — and, more important, its racial politics — was retrograde. But that all seems like a long time ago. Because the defining aspect of “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” is that these movies aren’t lecturing. They’re not preaching to the choir. They’re channeling. Whichever one wins, what this year’s Oscar night will celebrate is the unique ability that movies possess to incarnate the cataclysms around them. Jump to Comments Looking Back at the 2003 Oscars, When Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein Won Big and Hollywood Braced for War in the Middle East Under Nicole Kidman’s Spell: The Icon on Her Buzziest Oscar Moments, Life After Divorce and Insisting ‘Practical Magic 2’ Hire a Female Director JavaScript is required to load the comments. Loading comments...