No doubt it appeals to people at the Academy in its persuasion, but if we were to strip it down to film technical aspects it would no doubt still be a frontrunner for film of the year.
I haven't seen the movie in question but it looks like it underperformed pretty badly (-$90M) at the box office.
Their assertion that "It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good," just flat out doesn't hold under scrutiny. Why? Consider that there is a lineage of people who are essentially writing statements using a language "of the screen," people like Hitchcock, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Scorsese, to name a few. No matter what the film is ``about," the person crafting the film must grapple with the same things: how do I order the events? How does this work psychologically? Is this coherent? Does this say what I want it to? And such concerns scale down to very practical problem-solving on the day-to-day so that the vision may be best served.
Whether you agree with the values the film espouses or not, it succeeds as a work of cinema, full stop. That's true even if it was never shown in a theatre. People who work in the film industry know that, which is why the Oscars isn't precisely a "what is the wokest film" contest every year. Therefore if you assert it's just "preaching" correctly that is basically reducing something that has enormous value in terms of craft into just "messages;" ironically, you are doing so because you can't see past "messages."
It’s a movie about family loyalties transcending and persisting through all else, which is a pretty universal message.
Regarding wider adoption ”One Battle Another” is incomprehensible mess unless you are familiar with US. I understand the white supremacist conspiracy but nothing else makes sense _at all_. I trust when people say it’s super intelligent but I just don’t have any of the context.
Sinners is a cool music video that is about 5x too long - the few dances are really nice, some of the characters have very strong presence and few dialogues really are strong but … I would not categorize it as industry leading in anything unless the industry reference points are super low
The tech for in-cockpit capture and presentation of the races themselves was great, but the dialogue and basically everything off-track was boring or rote.
I am not sure why you see "One Battle After Another" as preachy. It was ultimately a chase movie, perhaps you did not like the intent of the revolutionaries who kicked off the chase, but there was no lecturing as far as I could tell. All of the characters were flawed and broken. Moments where characters could do the "right thing" many ended up doing things out of self interest. The movie was deeply cynical and piercing critique on radicalism left and right.
The movie also has a metacritic score of 95, so you are objectively wrong.
Did you even see the movie?