India, March 17 -- Paul Thomas Anderson's politically charged film, One Battle After Another, was nominated in 13 categories and won six Oscars, including for Best Feature and Best Director. This is not surprising since many believe that the film, loosely based on an early Thomas Pynchon novel, Vineland, anticipates the rise of an authoritarian regime and endorses political action in defence of liberal values. Pynchon is hardly a political extremist, even though his fiction has been radical and genre-defining. Anderson's interpretation, however, is political in the way he invokes the anarchist politics of the 1960s to address the concerns and fears in Trump's America. The film uses the trope of a lone ranger protecting his family/daughter against evil forces and a violent State; the stoned hero, almost an inversion of the Rambo character, is disillusioned with the compromises made by his comrades. That the French 75, the radical group at the film's heart, supports immigrants and works to ensure their safety against a militaristic regime is sure to resonate in today's world, where most nations have shut their doors on migrants. The moral universe of One Battle is anti-authoritarian, but it stops short of endorsing the radical alternative available in the film. In fact, it reveals the corrupted soul of the French 75, which is scarred by individual ambitions and nihilistic violence, not very different from the State it despises. Perhaps the film's very American idiom endeared it to the Oscar jury, which ignored The Secret Agent, a searing political thriller that shines a light on State-sanctioned killings in Brazil in the 1970s. Between The Secret Agent, reminiscent of Costa Gavras' films in its very sober look at the structures that facilitate dictatorship, and One Battle, the Oscars have sharply highlighted the violent inner life of authoritarian regimes....