OPINION: What it means to be a parent; what it means to be a child

On Sunday, “One Battle After Another” was awarded Best Picture by the Academy Awards. This was something I’ve been predicting for a while, yet I haven’t been saving my praise for it like I did for “Anora” last year.

“One Battle After Another” wasn’t just the best movie from last year; it’s by far the best movie to represent 2025. For a film space that’s often nostalgic to times long ago, “One Battle” is brutally and politically modern, recognizant of the world as it is today.

For a movie that starts with revolutionary group The French 75 hijacking a immigrant detention center, “One Battle” holds an eerie balance between fiction and the world of today. With military forces finding hollow reasoning to invade a town of mostly immigrants in the back half of the movie, this future sight is even more powerful.

Politics aside, there’s something else about “One Battle After Another” which represents the movies this year on a deeper, emotional scale. This has been a year constantly grappling with what it means to bring the next generation into this world.

“Sorry, Baby,” 2025’s most overlooked movie, had a woman grappling with how horrific the world can be, especially for a woman. How could anyone want to bring life into a world where bad things can happen to them?

“Marty Supreme” had a man ignoring his own responsibilities in an effort to chase an undefinable and ever-expanding dream. Yet, what’s awaiting him at home, a newborn child, becomes far more important.

“Hamnet” and “Train Dreams” had families ripped apart by the death of a child. “The Secret Agent” and “The Phoenician Scheme” showed the distance between parents and children after abandonment.

“Sentimental Value,” on the far end of this, depicts a father struggling to reconnect with his children in the only way he could think of, through artistry. There will always be lingering feelings of what could have been, but a path forward can still be forged through wordless understanding.

This has been a year about what it means to be a parent and what it means to be a child. And nothing is more connected to all of that than “One Battle After Another.”

To make this point, I’m narrowing the scope of “One Battle After Another” to a single character dynamic, Bob Ferguson and his daughter Willa. Bob, years after his time as a revolutionary, has been raising Willa alone for years after he fled to Baktan Cross while she was just a baby.

In the time since, Bob has been achingly paranoid that retribution will come to him. He forbids his daughter to have a phone in fear of cell tower tracking and forces her to carry a unique scanning device in case things go wrong.

Bob, in his previous life as Ghetto Pat, had revolution igniting his veins, giving him energy to make changes in an unjust world becoming increasingly cruel and petty. Years after his own failure, he still idolizes revolutionaries and tells Willa’s teacher to make sure she’s being taught the right things.

Yet, Willa will at some point move beyond Bob’s reach. “One Battle After Another” forces both Bob and Willa to come to terms with the fact that Bob won’t be able to protect Willa, and she has to grow up in a world that will not be kind to people like her.

But, Willa has her own agency. She has a phone despite her father’s wishes and has her own secrets that come naturally from a teenager moving away from her parent’s dominion. One day, Willa will be beyond Bob’s reach, and she has the potential to do amazing things.

Bob may have failed, but Willa still has a chance to find her own change. To become something bigger than herself. To fight, not for the patriotically blind allegiance to the powers that be, but for the people who don’t have the options to fight for themselves.

If nothing more, “One Battle After Another” is resonating because of optimism. There is a deep hope and belief that, despite our own perceived failures, there is a path ahead bigger than we could ever imagine as long as it’s nurtured.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson, accepting his award for Best Adapted Screenplay, said, “I wrote this movie for my kids to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world we’re handing off to them. But also with the encouragement that they will be the generation that hopefully brings us some common sense and decency.”

Oscars host Conan O’Brien’s monologue Sunday felt particularly resonant. “Let us celebrate, not because we think all is well, but because we work and hope for the better in the days ahead.”

Viva la revolución!