The evening’s final two film winners captured the apparent tension between defining Hollywood as a place for escapism and acknowledging real-world uncertainty. The Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy winner One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, is a propulsive thriller about a former revolutionary, who is thrust back into his previous lifestyle to save his daughter. The Best Motion Picture—Drama winner Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s take on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel imagining the hidden origins of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is a potent tearjerker about art’s transformative power. Both movies are made by auteur filmmakers; both offer cinematic visions of best sellers. But while One Battle After Another touches, as my colleague David Sims put it, a “raw nerve” in its examination of the costs of American political violence, Hamnet is its opposite in scope and tone: a formal, intimate period piece about the Bard and his personal tragedy.