Is Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another" the Oscar favorite?

PTA is giving us a dark, political thriller-comedy starring Leonardo DiCaprio. We're hyped. Also, Anderson and Benicio del Toro are so in sync. For some, the conversation about "One Battle After Another" is the price tag. Reportedly, this Warner Bros. release cost $140 million to make, and those who like to sweat the bottom line of billion-dollar conglomerates have been preemptively dunking on the studio for likely not making that money back. "There Will Be Blood," a true masterpiece of the craft, made $76.2 million worldwide, for comparison's sake.

The butt of the scuttle variety, though, says that Warner Bros. believes DiCaprio's star power will juice the box office. Also, if "One Battle After Another" is an awards darling, they get cache, especially if the movie wins Best Picture. That would be notable, because Anderson has yet to win Best Picture at the Oscars, and is in the running for the best director yet to win Best Director. We aren't the sort to worry about Warner Bros. cash flow, but we are the sort to speculate on Oscar odds in March.

The field is already starting to sort itself out, and unfortunately for Warner Bros. a couple of the movies already out of the running are from their studio. "The Alto Knights" was always a bit of a long shot, but Bong Joon-ho's follow-up to "Parasite," which won Best Picture, is also definitely not in play. Shout out to "Mickey 17," a fun, weird movie, but it is not going to win Best Picture, and there's a decent chance it doesn't get a nomination.

"Sinners" another Warner Bros. movie, looks intriguing, and Ryan Coogler was able to make "Black Panther" an Oscars player. However, it also turns out "Sinners" seems to be about vampires? Honestly, that makes us more interested in seeing it, but makes it hard to envision it as an Oscars favorite. Wes Anderson (another director who knows how to make del Toro pop) and Richard Linklater both rule, but both have only really gotten Oscars love for a single film. That would be "Grand Budapest Hotel" for the former and "Boyhood" for the latter.

Ultimately, there are three movies that, speculatively speaking, are in the running, and two of them are sequels.

It feels possible that if "Avatar: Fire and Ash" hits the Academy voters will want to give James Cameron his props for the whole franchise to this point. Don't forget "Avatar" was the perceived favorite until "The Hurt Locker" swooped in. Still, this outcome feels below "One Battle After Another" in the pecking order.

Yorgos Lanthimos is in the PTA space of his films earning Oscar nominations, and even a couple wins for Best Actress, but he doesn't have a Best Director nor a Best Picture winner. "Bugonia" reunites Lanthimos with his muse Emma Stone, who the Academy loves, but his challenging work makes it tough to win Best Picture due to ranked-choice voting. There will be the diehards there to rank "Bugonia" first, in theory, but will the nines and tens greatly outpace the threes and fours?

Ultimately, though, "One Battle After Another" sits behind one more in our estimation. That would be "Wicked: For Good." The first part of the "Wicked" dyad got a bunch of nominations and a couple wins. It is easy to imagine some voters holding back knowing the second part was coming, a la "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" cleaning up as the story ended. If you take the popularity of "Wicked" and add that factor in, well, as long as "For Good" sticks the landing, PTA may be left on the outside looking in once more.