The Last Oscar Take You'll Ever Read

A solution to the hot air suffocating us this awards season

- MARA REINSTEIN

This column was conceived not so much as an assignment but as a desperate cry for help to my editors. Please. I'm begging you.

Don't make me write a think piece on One Battle After Another.

Actually, forget the Battle. I'm waging a war.

This time of year — and this year in particular — we are getting film think pieces. Binders and binders full of film think pieces. They tell us whether Paul Thomas Anderson may or may not adhere to a particular sociopolitical agenda. (I swear we had these same conversations about James Gunn and Superman a few months ago.) How Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt is a provocative postmodern, post-#MeToo, post-Tár look at victimisation culture that's right on time — or is it way too late? That Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite is the nuclear weapons-funding policy document we've been waiting for or a cautionary tale about the perils of an elliptical ending. I can't keep track anymore, and I don't want to.

We are drowning in think pieces. I'm here to say: Stop with the think pieces. Maybe you feel the same but have been afraid to admit it? That's okay. We're in a safe space.

To be clear, I'm not referring to traditional reviews or a smart text-based conversation or reflection. I'm singling out pundits who try to torture a single movie into great meaning, hoping it will make them the next Susan Sontag or Thomas Friedman.

If you admired