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
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