For the next five months, box office stats are the only numbers that will be cited for or against “One Battle After Another” and its Best Picture campaign, making its much higher review numbers almost irrelevant. Nonetheless, while its nearly perfect reviews are now only a small part of “One Battle After Another’s” Best Picture resume, it is still a part that will make history as soon as it is nominated, making it perhaps one of the top 10 reviewed Best Picture nominees of the entire expanded era.
As of Saturday, October 4th, “One Battle After Another” had a 96% Tomatometer score, which only around 30 Best Picture nominees from 2009 to 2024 have reached or exceeded. More tellingly, it is an upper echelon; only five Best Picture winners in the expanded era have reached this point. Although every Best Picture winner since 2009 except “Green Book” has rated over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, only five have scored 96% or higher up to now.
99%: “Parasite”
98%: “Moonlight”
97%: “Spotlight”
96%: “The Hurt Locker” and “Argo”
Still, the most revealing stat on Rotten Tomatoes has always been the average critics’ rating, even though no one can find it on the site anymore without right-clicking on a laptop, selecting the “Inspect (Q)” option, and searching “averagerating” among the HTML text. In any case, such extra research reveals that as of Saturday, October 4th, “One Battle After Another’s” average critic rating is a whopping 9.0.
This would truly put the movie in elite company among Best Picture nominees of the last 15+ years, as only seven of them have reached the 9.0 average rating milestone up to now.
9.4 avg critics rating: “Parasite”
9.3 avg rating: “Boyhood”
9.1 avg rating: “Past Lives”
9.0 avg rating: “Moonlight,” “Gravity,” “The Social Network,” and “Roma”
For those who don’t value any Rotten Tomatoes ratings that much and prefer the more exclusive ratings of Metacritic, “One Battle After Another” is in pretty solid historic company there as well. As of Saturday, October 4th, its Metacritic score was at 95 through 61 reviews, which would make “One Battle After Another” only the 12th Best Picture nominee of the expanded era to score 95 or higher there.
100 MetaCritic score: “Boyhood”
99: “Moonlight”
97: “Parasite”
96: “12 Years a Slave,” “Gravity,” “Manchester by the Sea,” and “Roma”
95: “The Hurt Locker,” “The Social Network,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” and “Amour”
Should “One Battle After Another” continue to meet all these milestones on MetaCritic and Rotten Tomatoes, it will reach an upper echelon almost no Best Picture contender has in this decade, and perhaps none since “Parasite.” Despite such highly acclaimed recent Best Picture winners this decade like “Nomadland,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Oppenheimer,” and “Anora,” none of them reached the kind of soaring review scores across the board that “One Battle After Another” has to this point. And barring some massive surge from the likes of “Hamnet,” “Sentimental Value,” or an unseen film like “Marty Supreme,” no other 2025 contender will touch “One Battle After Another’s” review numbers either.
With that kind of advantage, it is tempting to say so many Oscar pundits and fans are right to call the race for “One Battle After Another” right now. It is tempting to say no box office numbers or losses will really make a dent against something so loved by people who did see and rate it, and that nothing can possibly come close to such a highly rated movie with such overwhelming narratives for its politics and for Paul Thomas Anderson.
As such, something already in the company of the most acclaimed Best Picture contenders in this entire era cannot possibly lose – or so the case would only seem to be. In fact, putting “One Battle After Another” in this elite, nearly perfectly reviewed company only reflects how fragile it might actually be, if only in a deeper historical context.
“One Battle After Another” is now as highly rated as Best Picture winners like “Parasite,” “Moonlight,” and “12 Years a Slave” are. But it is also in the company of films like “Boyhood,” “Gravity,” “The Social Network,” “Roma,” “Manchester by the Sea” and “Zero Dark Thirty” – all films that lost Best Picture, and most of which lost to films with much lower review scores.
“Boyhood” is still the only perfectly reviewed modern Best Picture nominee on MetaCritic, and it still lost to “Birdman” and its mere 87 MetaCritic score in 2014. “Roma” was the most acclaimed film of 2018 by a wide margin, and yet it still lost to the worst-reviewed Best Picture winner of the entire era in “Green Book.” “The Social Network” also controversially lost to a much less critically adored but much more Academy Award-adored film in “The King’s Speech” in 2010, while “Gravity” and “Manchester by the Sea” had the bad luck of competing with “12 Years a Slave” and “Moonlight” in 2013 and 2016.
“Parasite” and “Moonlight” are perhaps the two top-rated Best Picture winners and nominees of the last 15 years, but their wins were not a given. In fact, “Parasite” was favored to lose to “1917” right up until Oscar night, and “Moonlight” actually lost Best Picture to “La La Land” in 2016 for about exactly one minute. These two films were never the favorites to win it all until they actually won it all, and they probably wouldn’t have if their reviews and adoration weren’t as massive as they were.
In contrast, many pundits are all too eager to make “One Battle After Another” the big favorite if not guaranteed winner in early October, unlike a “Parasite” or “Moonlight.” If anything, it is starting out more like “Boyhood,” “Roma,” or “The Social Network,” as they were both immediate favorites to win, if not sweep the entire season. But when the months dragged on and when more traditional challengers and/or late surges like “Birdman,” “Green Book,” and “The King’s Speech” made their moves, all the perfect reviews in the world couldn’t save these early favorites.
Will months of being seen as the near-perfect, universally adored favorite take their toll on “One Battle After Another” as well – at least in time to be caught by a more traditional challenger like “Hamnet,” another barrier breaking rave reviewed phenomenon like “Sinners,” an international darling like “Sentimental Value,” a legacy blockbuster like “Wicked: For Good” or “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” or a last-minute arrival like “Marty Supreme?” And though it is presumed the added factor of Anderson approaching his first Oscar win will put it over the top, like Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan did for “The Departed” and “Oppenheimer,” will something with far less box office and more potential for backlash like “One Battle After Another” become vulnerable, if enough voters want to honor Anderson more than the rest of his movie?
Year after year, Oscar pundits and fans must remind us before the voters do that the most highly rated and so-called “best” movies don’t always win. It’s only every once in a while that something with a “Parasite” or “Moonlight” level of critical perfection comes along and goes all the way – and even then they need improbable comebacks to finish the job – when more often films like “Boyhood,” “The Social Network,” or “Roma” come along and only have everyone backing it until the very end. There have been highly rated wire-to-wire winners like “Nomadland, “Oppenheimer,” and arguably “Everything Everywhere All at Once” lately, yet none of them were put at the very highest and historic level of critical acclaim – not like critics are already doing for “One Battle After Another.”
It may well be nothing like “One Battle After Another” has united critics like this – at least ones with enough of a platform to get on Rotten Tomatoes and MetaCritic – in the entire 2020s. Yet while this makes it all too easy to assume Academy voters will do the same, the last 15 years have shown that films with such perfect scores early in the season don’t always have a perfect Oscar night ending.
Perhaps we really haven’t seen an example like “One Battle After Another” test that out in this decade, if not in this entire era. But as adored as it is by practically everyone now, five months from now could still paint a much more mixed picture entirely.
Do you think “One Battle After Another” is the frontrunner for Best Picture? How many Oscar nominations do you think it will receive? Please let us know in the comments section below and on Next Best Picture’s X account and check out the team’s latest Oscar predictions here.
