There Will Be Blood: The Oscar PTA Always Deserved
- Viknesh Silvalingam
- 15 minutes ago
- 4 min read
There's a line Paul Thomas Anderson delivered at the podium on March 15th that I keep coming back to.
"You make a guy work hard for one of these. I really appreciate it."
That was it. No sweeping gratitude speech. No laundry list of thank-yous. Just a man who had waited nearly 30 years, held the thing he'd been chasing, and chose to acknowledge the weight of it with a single wry sentence. That's PTA in a nutshell, restrained where others are theatrical, precise where others are showy.
When he finally took the stage at the 98th Academy Awards, they called it a win for One Battle After Another. And it was. But for a lot of us who have been watching his career with reverence, and a fair amount of frustration on his behalf, it felt like something broader. It felt like a correction.
Because here's the thing: PTA should have won Best Director in 2008.
There Will Be Blood deserved it. Completely. Without question.
Let me explain why, not as a film fan, but as someone who works in production and thinks about the craft of filmmaking every single day.
The First Fifteen Minutes of There will be Blood Says Everything
There Will Be Blood has since been widely regarded as Paul Thomas Anderson's magnum opus, as well as one of the greatest films of the 21st century and of all time. That reputation didn't come from marketing. It came from one of the most audacious opening sequences in modern American cinema.
The film opens in near-total silence. No dialogue. No exposition. Just a man alone in the earth, digging. For fifteen minutes, Anderson trusts the image completely. He trusts the audience completely. He doesn't explain Daniel Plainview. He doesn't contextualize the era. He simply shows you a man, and the land, and the obsession, and by the time Plainview hauls himself out of that mine shaft, you already understand everything about who he is.
That is directing. Not coverage. Not dialogue. Not performance direction. The decision to open a studio film in silence, to let image and sound design carry the weight of character introduction, that is a director betting on his own vision at the highest possible level.
The Land as a Character
The production settled on Marfa, Texas, as the primary location. As cinematographer Robert Elswit noted, there aren't many spots in America where you can stand on top of a hill and see absolutely nothing in all directions.
That choice was PTA's. And it was everything.
Anderson and Elswit drew inspiration from photographers like Edward Weston and painters like Andrew Wyeth, artists who captured stark and desolate landscapes that mirror their subjects' internal struggles. The cinematography also echoes directors like John Ford, especially in expansive shots of barren plains and towering oil rigs that evoke both grandeur and isolation.
Every frame of that film carries the weight of the American West, the bigness of it, the indifference of it. Daniel Plainview isn't just greedy; he's greedy against a backdrop that makes human ambition look absurd. Anderson understood that the landscape wasn't a setting. It was a moral argument.
A striking visual motif throughout is the use of vast negative space. The barren landscapes dominate the frame, isolating the characters and emphasizing their insignificance against nature's overwhelming forces, and against their own greed.
That's not a DP choice alone. That is a director who knows exactly what his film is about and builds every compositional decision around that meaning.
The Score as Direction
Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood is one of the great collaborations in modern film. But here too, Anderson's direction is the invisible hand.
The score doesn't underscore emotion, it precedes it. It destabilizes the audience before the scene earns its tension. It's dissonant, aggressive, and wrong in all the right ways. That's a director who understood that music in this film should function like oil itself, something that seeps into the cracks and corrupts everything it touches.
No one told Greenwood to write something unsettling. A director made that call.
What the Oscar Voters Got Wrong in 2008
The Coen Brothers won Best Director that year for No Country for Old Men, and honestly, no argument there. That film is equally deserving. Two masterworks landing in the same year is just bad timing, not bad judgment. The Academy made a defensible call.
But consider what Anderson was doing simultaneously, and what he lost to: There Will Be Blood appeared on 46% of critics' decade-end lists and was ranked the best film of the decade on five of them. Rolling Stone's Peter Travers called it the number one film of the entire decade. Time's Richard Schickel called it "one of the most wholly original American movies ever made."
That's the film they passed on. At the time.
And if the Oscars were slow to recognize it, the Library of Congress wasn't. In 2022, There Will Be Blood was inducted into the National Film Registry, recognized as "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant."
Only 25 films make it each year, chosen from the entire history of American cinema. That's not a consolation prize. That's history making its correction.
Why It Still Matters
When PTA stood at that podium and delivered that line, "you make a guy work hard for one of these", the laugh in the room was warm. But the subtext was real. There Will Be Blood was the film that announced to the world that he was operating on a different level. Everything that followed, The Master, Phantom Thread, Licorice Pizza, and now One Battle After Another, was built on the foundation of that film's ambition.
He won the Oscar for a body of work. But that body of work has a beating heart, and it's 158 minutes long, shot in Marfa, Texas, and it ends with a man alone in a bowling alley declaring that he's finished.
The Academy finally caught up. Better late than never.
Comments