Paul Thomas Anderson Just Became a Rare Gen X Best Director Oscar Winner for ‘One Battle After Another’

Photos: Getty Images ; Illustration: Dillen phelps

By winning the Oscar for Best Director for One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson has made a belated Gen X triumph. The movie itself]feels authentically Gen X in that it doesn’t embrace selling out idealistic values while still acknowledging the foibles of growing older. It also plugs right into current events unfolding in front of us while nonetheless springing from a period in American film history – the mid-to-late 1990s – that informed some of the medium’s best work of the subsequent 30 years. On a more technical level, however, the Generation X films and filmmakers who came into prominence throughout that 1990s boom have somehow yielded surprisingly few Oscars for directing. Even as their movies became hits and sometimes awards favorites, the Best Director statuette in particular has eluded most of them.

To wit: Some of the edgier Baby Boomer directors like the Coen Brothers, Steven Soderbergh, Danny Boyle, and Alfonso Cuarón have all been legitimized by Oscar wins, with Cuarón and Soderbergh right on the Gen X border while Boyle, with a later start, arguably even more associated with the ’90s indie boom (as the guy who made Trainspotting would have to be). But being a technical boomer seems to be an advantage. Meanwhile, millennials have made inroads in recent years: Damien Chazelle (La La Land), the Daniels (Everything Everywhere All At Once), and Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) have all won.

But while most of those wins felt current, rather than the belated feeling of handing one to Martin Scorsese in 2007, they nonetheless skip over most of Generation X’s film luminaries, at least in terms of Americans. Among the few Gen X winners: the British-American Christopher Nolan, who’s only the most successful and popular director of his generation; South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho; and Sean Baker, who is around the same age as Anderson but hasn’t been as well-known for as long; timing-wise, he feels closer to Zhao or the Daniels.

Paul Thomas Anderson AP Photo

On the other hand, just look at the absolute litany of Gen X or Gen X-coded directors who haven’t actually won: Quentin Tarantino. Wes Anderson. David Fincher. Spike Jonze. M. Night Shyamalan. Sofia Coppola. Alexander Payne. David O. Russell. Darren Aronofsky. Yorgos Lanthimos. Adam McKay. And it’s not as if the Academy doesn’t go for their movies at all; they’ve all been nominated at least once, and many of them (Tarantino, Anderson, Jonze, Coppola, Payne, McKay) have won awards for writing, not directing.

Now, technically, some of those folks are also boomers. Linklater, Russell, Payne, Fincher, and Tarantino were all born before the 1965 generational turnover, just as Soderbergh was. But if a few more of that crowd had won Best Director, it would at least feel representative of the era where Gen X was a dominant force, even if Fincher was actually born in 1962, not 1965. Spiritually, he certainly feels more a part of that generation than actual member Tom Hooper, who won for The King’s Speech. (Let the boomers have that one!) I mean, you’re going to tell me that Richard Linklater’s work doesn’t read Gen-X? And it’s not as if Tarantino has been beaten repeatedly by people who are actually Gen-X to his late-period boomer. No, two of his three losses were to Robert Zemeckis (born 1952) and Kathryn Bigelow (born 1951). Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, Before Sunrise and its sequels, Three Kings, and Sideways are Gen-X movies, regardless of when their makers were born. And if technical boomers can’t win for Gen-X movies, what chance to actual Xers have?

Anderson may help turn that around. Of course, not all major directors wind up with an Oscar; it’s scarcer than the acting awards, and directors generally make fewer movies than actors. But back in 1996, Anderson’s first film Hard Eight coincided with same-year feature debuts from the other Anderson (Bottle Rocket), Payne (Citizen Ruth); Jonze, Coppola, and Aronofsky were all right around the corner. Again, Anderson isn’t the first one of that group to win an Oscar, but he is their first and quite belated Best Director.

It also feels significant that Anderson beat out the extremely millennial Ryan Coogler (born 1986), who, naturally, walked away with one of those Best Screenplay prizes. It’s bound to feel a little fraught, given that a Black director has never won this prize. (12 Years a Slave won Best Picture, but director Steve McQueen lost to Alfonso Cuarón; director Spike Lee has an Oscar, but it’s for co-writing BlackKklansman.) Will the next decade see a bunch of Gen-X-coded directors circle back, with Fincher or Tarantino or Coppola following Anderson to the podium? Or is Anderson the last of that bunch as Coogler’s generation fully takes over?

It will depend on their projects, of course; plenty of past Anderson movies were enough for nominations without quite generating One Battle-level enthusiasm. There also aren’t quite the same numbers of prestige-courting millennial directors out there. (Josh Safdie, nominated this year, is one; Greta Gerwig is another, though with three screenplay nominations and only one directing nod, she may join the litany of beloved directors to win for writing, first or only.) For now, Generation X can claim a belated triumph, perfect for their semi-overlooked latchkey-kid sensibility.