LAFCA Awards 2025: How ‘One Battle After Another’ Just Rewired the Oscars Conversation

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has crowned One Battle After Another as Best Picture, reshaping the early 2025 awards conversation and spotlighting bold, adventurous filmmaking over traditional studio contenders. In a vote that favors artistic risk over safe prestige plays, LAFCA also handed Paul Thomas Anderson the Best Director prize for the same movie, while Ethan Hawke and Rose Byrne took top acting honors for Blue Moon and If I Had Legs I'd Kick You.

Coming from a critics group that has historically predicted — or provocatively challenged — the Oscars, LAFCA’s choices say a lot about where the film industry’s creative energy is right now: smaller budgets, thornier stories, and established auteurs pushing into stranger, more vulnerable territory.

Cast and crew of One Battle After Another on set
Official still from One Battle After Another, LAFCA’s 2025 Best Picture winner. Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Why the LAFCA Awards Still Matter in 2025

In an awards ecosystem flooded with guild prizes, regional critics’ lists, and influencer-branded “best of” content, LAFCA still cuts through the noise. The group’s voting is blunt, occasionally combative, and rarely dictated by studio campaigning in the way the Oscars or Golden Globes often can be.

Historically, LAFCA has:

  • Boosted international auteurs like Bong Joon Ho, Michael Haneke, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi well before wider U.S. recognition.
  • Split from Oscar conventional wisdom by crowning formally daring films such as Moonlight, Drive My Car, and Mad Max: Fury Road.
  • Created momentum for performances that initially flew under the radar, later becoming awards-season staples.

So while the LAFCA Awards don’t directly dictate Academy voting, they do something arguably more valuable: they signal to serious moviegoers, streamers, and international markets which titles actually define a cinematic year, not just campaign budgets.

Critics’ awards like LAFCA often spotlight films before mainstream audiences discover them.

‘One Battle After Another’ Wins Best Picture: What That Actually Signals

LAFCA naming One Battle After Another Best Picture instantly catapults the film from cinephile favorite to bona fide awards-season force. Even without the massive marketing push typical of major studio releases, a LAFCA win tends to travel — across social media, Letterboxd, and eventually into streaming algorithms.

The title itself hints at the film’s preoccupations: conflict not just as spectacle, but as a series of internal and external confrontations. While the full plot details are still being digested by wider audiences, the critical consensus paints a picture of a movie that’s:

  • Formally ambitious, with a director unafraid of long takes, disorienting cuts, and morally ambiguous characters.
  • Politically aware without being didactic, engaging with contemporary anxieties about power, identity, and violence.
  • Emotionally grounded, allowing performers space to inhabit flawed, deeply human roles.

Within this context, the Best Picture win feels less like a surprise and more like an endorsement of the film as 2025’s “conversation piece” — the movie you’re supposed to have an opinion about, even if you haven’t gotten around to seeing it yet.

One Battle After Another doesn’t just depict conflict — it interrogates the stories we tell about heroism, failure and the cost of winning.”
Director and crew filming an intense dramatic scene
Behind the camera, One Battle After Another leans on meticulous staging and performance-driven storytelling.

Paul Thomas Anderson Wins Best Director: A Career of Risk Taking Pays Off

Paul Thomas Anderson winning Best Director from LAFCA for One Battle After Another feels like both a coronation and a pivot. This is the filmmaker behind There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights, Phantom Thread, and Licorice Pizza — a body of work that turned 1970s New Hollywood energy into something deeply personal and strangely modern.

The LAFCA prize suggests that Anderson’s latest isn’t just another auteur victory lap. Industry chatter frames the film as stylistically leaner but emotionally raw, less nostalgic than Licorice Pizza and more bruising than Inherent Vice.

“You don’t go into a Paul Thomas Anderson film expecting comfort. You go in expecting to be rattled — and One Battle After Another rattles in a low, persistent frequency.”

From a craft perspective, critics point to:

  1. Controlled chaos: sequences that feel improvised but are precisely blocked.
  2. Sound and silence: the use of quiet, off-screen sound, and abrupt cuts to heighten unease.
  3. Character geography: a clear sense of space and emotional proximity in crowded, confrontational scenes.
Film director watching a scene on a monitor
Anderson’s direction reportedly favors long, patient takes that let tension organically build between actors.

Ethan Hawke & Rose Byrne Take Lead Performance Honors

LAFCA’s lead performance awards went to Ethan Hawke for Blue Moon and Rose Byrne for the intriguingly titled If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, underscoring the group’s preference for emotionally thorny, character-driven work over conventional “Oscar bait.”

Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon

Hawke’s late-career run — between his work with Richard Linklater, his stage roles, and turns in genre-leaning projects — has turned him into a kind of patron saint of soulful middle-aged characters. In Blue Moon, early reviews point to a performance steeped in regret, midlife recalibration, and a sense of someone quietly rewriting their own life story in real time.

Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

Byrne, meanwhile, has been quietly doing the hardest thing in Hollywood: nailing both broad comedy and grounded drama. The title If I Had Legs I'd Kick You suggests something tonally off-center — maybe a dark comedy, maybe a prickly character study, maybe both — and LAFCA’s recognition hints that Byrne has found a role that lets her lean fully into moral messiness without losing her timing or vulnerability.

“These are performances that don’t announce themselves as ‘big’ but linger in your head for days — the kind of work LAFCA has historically been very good at noticing first.”
Actor performing an emotional monologue on stage or set
LAFCA’s acting awards often favor layered, unflashy performances over pure showmanship.

Craft, International Cinema, and ‘The Secret Agent’

Beyond the headline wins, LAFCA is known for championing the below-the-line crafts — cinematography, editing, production design — and for giving serious space to international films. This year, The Secret Agent appears among the major titles surfacing in LAFCA’s voting, suggesting a thriller or espionage drama with enough stylistic or thematic heft to break out of genre confines.

Critics at the vote reportedly highlighted:

  • Visual storytelling: the kind of framing and lighting that communicates paranoia and moral compromise without over-explanation.
  • Editing rhythm: a balance between slow-burn tension and moments of sharp, destabilizing cuts.
  • Global sensibility: a narrative that feels aware of international politics without reducing characters to symbols.
LAFCA’s awards often highlight technical achievements that casual audiences don’t always notice but absolutely feel.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and What This Says About 2025 Cinema

Where LAFCA’s Picks Shine

  • Bold taste: Championing One Battle After Another reinforces a preference for formally challenging cinema.
  • Actor-forward choices: Hawke and Byrne’s wins underline a respect for nuanced, emotionally complex work.
  • Global and craft awareness: Titles like The Secret Agent keep the conversation from being purely U.S.-centric or star-driven.

Where the Lineup Might Fall Short

  • Accessibility: Some of these films may be difficult to find quickly, especially outside major cities or without premium streaming access.
  • Perception of insularity: The emphasis on auteurs and smaller titles can read as “critics’ movies only,” even when the work is emotionally accessible.
  • Box office disconnect: There’s still a gap between what audiences pay to see and what critics deem “best,” though that’s hardly unique to LAFCA.

Still, in a moment where streaming platforms favor algorithm-friendly content and theatrical releases skew heavily towards franchises, LAFCA’s list quietly insists that ambitious, adult-oriented cinema is alive — just not always in the places major marketing campaigns direct you to look.

Golden film award trophy on a dark background
Awards may not define a film’s worth, but they do shape which stories get discovered, preserved, and debated.

Where to Watch and What to Keep an Eye On Next

Release strategies are still in flux — some of these LAFCA winners will expand theatrically, others will quietly drop on streaming, and a few may roll out internationally before they’re widely available in the U.S. Checking platforms like JustWatch or local arthouse cinema listings is often the fastest way to locate them.

For more formal details and credits as they update, keep an eye on:

As the Oscars conversation heats up, the key question will be how many of LAFCA’s choices manage to cross over into mainstream awards — and how many remain cult favorites that future viewers discover and claim as “their” films. Either way, the 2025 LAFCA Awards have done what strong criticism is supposed to do: point us toward work that challenges, unsettles, and refuses to fit neatly into the algorithm.