One Battle After Another Should Win One Of Its Less-Famous Actors An Oscar Nomination

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for "One Battle After Another."

Don't call it a comeback just yet, but we can safely go out on a limb and suggest that the rapturous praise heaped upon Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another" (including by /Film's own Chris Evangelista in his review here) is a fitting button to a year of uncertainty for Warner Bros. For the most part, the studio put its faith (and resources) behind a number of exceedingly risky, but creatively ambitious titles. There's a sense of poetic justice that all of this could potentially reach its crescendo with a genuine awards darling by one of our greatest living filmmakers.

In a cast made up of some of the biggest and most recognizable names around — from Leonardo DiCaprio to Sean Penn to Regina Hall to Benicio del Toro to Teyana Taylor — one up-and-coming talent manages to stand above all the rest. Despite a limited body of work, a relative dearth of actual screen time, and the added challenge of almost exclusively sharing the screen with either DiCaprio or Penn, it's a credit to Chase Infiniti that she steals every one of her scenes as Willa Ferguson. Her spirited, manic, and raw performance will undoubtedly launch her career to great heights. But we're here to say that she deserves proper industry recognition for her star-making turn. 

No, Oscar nominations and even record-breaking critical acclaim are hardly the end-all, be-all standards by which we ought to hold actors or movies to — but they certainly matter, particularly for one like "One Battle After Another." While it may be unlikely for such an expensive proposition to break even (let alone turn a profit) during its theatrical run, other avenues exist to convince studios that these are movies actually worth making.

Let the campaigning for Chase Infiniti's Oscar nomination officially begin here and now, folks.

Enter Chase Infiniti as Willa Ferguson, the (presumptive) daughter of the former revolutionary who now goes by the name of Bob Ferguson. After almost the entire opening hour of the film focuses on his and lover Perfidia Beverly Hills' exploits as members of the French 75 freedom fighters, the story finally skips ahead over a decade and a half. Perfidia has disappeared after being captured and turned rat by the fearsome Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. Bob has done his best to raise Willa on his own and in the safety of anonymity, far from the vengeance-driven influence of Lockjaw and the US government. But the washed-up shell of a man can't even convince his stubborn and strong-willed daughter to call him "Dad," let alone obey her paranoid father's wishes and remain the only teen in the country who doesn't own a cell phone.

From the moment Willa first arrives in that dojo to those blistering final moments on the highway, Infiniti carries the narrative on her shoulders while pulling off arguably the toughest balancing act of anyone in the cast. In other words, this is precisely the kind of performance that the Academy Awards were made to honor in the first place. As a possible launching pad for our next star in the making (as anyone who watched her go toe-to-toe with Jake Gyllenhaal in the Apple TV+ series "Presumed Innocent" already knows), Infiniti almost single-handedly justifies every cent spent on "One Battle After Another."

The bulk of the film's narrative centers on the villainous Lockjaw and his campaign to hunt down Bob Ferguson at all costs — not just to eradicate his revolutionary roots and the ideals he once stood for, but primarily to punch his ticket to the modern Ku Klux Klan (absurdly going by the name "The Christmas Adventurers Club") by erasing any evidence that Willa is actually his biracial daughter.

In any other movie, this would've pigeonholed Chase Infiniti in the role of the damsel in distress. Instead, we're given a front row seat to one of the most impressive big-screen debuts of any actor in her generation. Despite showing up later in the story than anyone else (almost a full hour into the action) and despite constantly going up against heavy-hitting stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn (and briefly Benicio del Toro), Infiniti holds her own and then some. Her ability to practically make DiCaprio shrink into the corner of a room during a father/daughter shouting match at their home in the early going is merely a taste of things to come. When Willa is captured by Lockjaw, what follows is an extended and unbearably tense series of sequences where the young actor puts the fear of the cinema gods into Penn's loathsome villain. Long before Willa finally regains her agency, there's never a single doubt that Infiniti has been fully in control of hers.

Is that enough to get the Academy's attention and reward a rising talent who's quickly building quite the resumé? In an ideal world, it would be. Either way, the voters have a perfect opportunity ahead of them to give this saga the happiest of endings.