It’s time to address the elephant in the room. The film that cleaned up at the Golden Globes and is poised to win in all the major categories at the Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay) is one of the most racially problematic mainstream movies Hollywood has produced in recent memory because the entire story is essentially about a hyper-sexualized Black woman who can’t get enough of white d*ck.
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I’m going to try to talk about this without spoiling anything. But you don’t have to see the film to understand why folks are mad about it.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s (PTA) “One Battle After Another” (OBAA) was nominated for nine Golden Globes and won four of them. That wouldn’t be impressive if it had not won Best Picture-Musical or Comedy with PTA winning Best Director and Best Screenplay for his adaptation of Vineland by Thomas Pynchon.
In those last two categories, OBAA beat out Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.” And when it comes to the Best Director category, honestly, I can see it.
Coogler did a masterful job of directing “Sinners,” but PTA is no slouch when he is in the director’s chair; so him beating Coogler in the director category doesn’t enrage me. Where this movie fails? The screenplay. And there is one huge issue with this film that should exclude it from being considered worthy of Best Picture or Best Screenplay in 2026. And it centers on character Perfidia Beverly Hills played by Teyana Taylor.
Let me say up front that I’m happy Teyana won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. She is now in pole position to win an Academy Award for her role in the film, and I love to see Black women win anything.
I just wish she wasn’t being awarded for portraying a hyper-sexualized Black Panther-adjacent revolutionary who hasn’t met a white man she can’t wait to jump on. And it’s not just her character that is problematic. There is Junglep*ssy played by, well, Junglep*ssy. (That may be her stage name, but there was no need to call her that in the film.)
The “white hero” has been a racist, tired Hollywood trope for decades. The White Savior complex is a worn-out relic that should have been left in the editing room years ago. Seeing Leonardo DiCaprio embody the “great white hope” yet again is a reminder that the industry would rather center a white protagonist than give Black agency a seat at the table.
The movie jumps ahead 16 years after Teyana’s character leaves the film and it shifts from being about Perfidia’s debauchery to a film about Leo’s character rushing to rescue his Black daughter like she is a damsel in distress.
At this point, we shouldn’t need to explain the math; just read this, this or watch this. We’ve seen enough movies like that. If I wanted a white savior movie I’d watch “The Blind Side” or “The Help.”
PTA is married to a Black woman (comedic actress Maya Rudolph), so he should know better than to write these characters this way. And the book this film is based on? I read that joint. Those characters are white. Anderson makes the choice to populate this film with a Black female character who loves white dudes. So why did he do it?
The argument could be made that he does so to poke fun at the stereotype of hyper-sexualized Black women, but why make white men the object of her affections? Why make her a woman uninterested in being a mother? And why do it at all as a white man?
We have Nia DaCosta, Ava DuVernay and a host of other Black female filmmakers who could do that if they wanted. We certainly don’t need a white man doing that in the sloppiest way imaginable.
“One Battle After Another” is a well-made film featuring compelling performances. Because of that, it is almost certainly going to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. When it does it will join “Crash,” “Green Book” and “Driving Miss Daisy” as celebrated movies made by white people that fumbled the bag on race.
I thought we left all this back in 2015 with #OscarsSoWhite. But if Academy voters award this film their highest prize over “Sinners,” they are doubling down on their commitment to keeping the Oscars just that: white as possible.
Straight From 
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