In a year full of exceptional movies, with exceptional themes and ideas, playing against the backdrop of a world torn apart by real and imagined wars, it is fitting that a film that encapsulated it all was the big winner of the 98th Academy Awards.One Battle After Another was that story, which showed us that there will always be people who do the “revolucion” and others who do the dishes, and the world needs both. The world also goes on — letting every new generation have its moments of doing the revolution and doing the dishes.AdvertisementAlso Read | Oscar-winning ‘Sinners’ proves the blues is more than music — it’s a story of Black survivalPaul Thomas Anderson, who co-wrote the film, also took home the director’s award for One Battle After Another, bringing to its craft the same lightness of being as its message. Unlike, say, Sinners, another great film with a powerful message, One Battle After Another didn’t deal in the blacks or whites (no pun intended) but entirely in the greys. Rarely have we needed that space more.There is the blind passion here of Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), the bathing gown-wrapped preciousness of Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), the dangerous absurdity of Col Lockjaw (Sean Penn), the wise insouciance of Sensei St Carlos (Benicio Del Toro), and the ferocious innocence of Willa (Chase Infiniti). That Anderson recognised Willa as the “heart” of One Battle After Another, in his Oscar speech, also shows that this film knows exactly where its own heart lies.It is visceral, pulsating, urgent anger that drove the other big contender of these Oscars – the crowd-favourite and stunner Sinners. It spoke of generations of suppression, of doors being closed and blood being sucked, of picking and choosing bits of America’s Black heritage, stripped of its origins, to serve a White guiltless cause.AdvertisementSinners is a film that demands to be seen, keeping the eyes and especially the ears open. It is an affirmation of the arrival of some of Hollywood’s biggest Black artists, crafting a space entirely their way. Ryan Coogler (who won for Best Original Screenplay) and Michael B Jordan (Best Actor) are undeniable before and after Sunday night (our Monday morning).But if Sinner’s strength is its fire, One Battle After Another’s is its cinders. It suggests old fires and also the possibility of breathing new life into them.There was another film in the reckoning that was demanding all our attention in the run-up to the Oscars, but which shockingly came up empty: Marty Supreme. This will be a hard landing for Timothée Chalamet who can be hardly faulted for giving it his all, to give us a youth whose ambition and talent will burn whatever and whoever stands in his way. It required a commitment to unlikability, with rare exceptions.Did the young star with a formidable body of work already behind him pay the price for thinking he could be brash, ambitious and unfiltered Marty in real life too? More likely the Academy thought Chalamet had many more years to get his hands around the golden statuette — and going by what’s on his calendar, they are not wrong.The race for Best Actor was perhaps sealed for the magnetic Jordan after the Academy kept its top two awards for One Battle After Another. But there was an actor who deserved to be up there this time, and that was Ethan Hawke. Blue Moon has him play someone who is the flip side of Marty Supreme, the man who is as brash, as confident and as talented, but who has it all and who throws it all away. Longing and desperation, and genius and wit, come together heartbreakingly in a frame that is altered to make Hawke seem small-statured (another chip that Lorenz Hart, the lyricist played by Hawke, carried on his shoulders), in a small gem of a film.It was Jessie Buckley’s time for the fourth biggest honour of the Academy, the Best Actress. Buckley has been commanding attention from the sidelines for some time now and Hamnet was her first solo on the big stage – a Shakespearean stage, no less – and she stands out in a film that itself is trying too hard.Sentimental Value, about fathers and daughters and their home that is a sublime character of its own, will go home happy too with the Best International Feature win. Though it is a bit disappointing that the Joachim Trier film that stands gloriously on the strength of its acting ensemble – all its four main actors got nominations – didn’t get any in that department.Could The Secret Agent have come close? Maybe it was too specific to a moment and time to hold a wider resonance.Which brings us back to revolutions, and the point of them – whether lost, or won. As best said by Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the US: “ “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”Here’s looking at you, America.The writer is editor (Planning and Projects), The Indian Express. shalini.langer@expressindia.com