Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” is favored to win the Academy Award for best picture. But, sad to say, the film is a loser for California geography — and the state treasury.

Your columnist, a believer in California independence, wanted to love a generation-long civil war waged by everyday Californians against a fascist U.S. regime.

But as someone who visits all corners of this state, I found myself totally confused — precisely because I recognized every single California setting.

This is a movie where characters make turns in San Diego and are suddenly in Sacramento. Or they run from a military assault in Humboldt County and seconds later show up 10 hours south in Lompoc. Or they start a car chase on the Central Coast and finish it on desert roads somewhere between Borrego Springs and the Salton Sea.

The movie would have been more accurately titled, “One California Place After Another.”

Why the dizzying geography? The choice appears mercenary, not artistic — a naked attempt to maximize the amount of money it could take from the California Film and Television Tax Credit program.

That attempt has been successful. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Film Commission have celebrated the movie’s awards-season success and the $8.4 million in tax credits that helped cover its $57.7 million budget. That’s a lot of money considering that we taxpayers don’t get a share of the profits.

More evidence that the project is a tax credit grab comes from the plot’s avoidance of Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, where Anderson routinely sets his movies.

That decision is relevant because state tax credits are 5% to 10% higher for productions that shoot outside Los Angeles. Those higher tax credits convinced legislators from the rest of the state to expand the program — from $330 million to $750 million.

That expansion has benefits for politicians — keep your Hollywood donors happy. But independent studies, including by the state’s own nonpartisan legislative analyst, have found no net economic benefit to California in subsidizing production.

Plus, giving $750 million to Hollywood tax credits is questionable with the state budget in deficit and the Trump administration cutting health care and food stamps.

This reality puts the financing of “One Battle After Another” at odds with its revolutionary spirit.

And the jarring geography, driven by tax credits, makes parts of the film seem unreal, which undermines its power.

Among the false notes are a robbery and speedy chase scene through downtown Sacramento near the state Capitol. As a frequent visitor to those sleepy blocks, I can testify that nothing moves fast, especially the state employees who walk even slower than they govern California.

“One Battle After Another” can be exhilarating, but only when it squares with reality, geographic and otherwise.

The film’s best scene is its opener, in which a group of California revolutionaries break into a federal immigration center and free the people held there. The scene was filmed in 2024 in Otay Mesa, right on the U.S.-Mexico border, at an actual federal detention facility, with the Biden administration’s assent. It ought to be repurposed into a training film, given the need to liberate detainees from the concentration camps the Trump administration is building across the nation.

The movie’s other great scene is an extended phone call and argument between the film’s lead character, a former revolutionary bomb expert turned Gen X burnout played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and a younger revolutionary answering the phone on a secret hotline for rebels.

Before he can gain the help of his former comrades to rescue his daughter, who has been targeted by the U.S. regime, DiCaprio must answer a series of questions about rebel ideology that function as a password. But, after years of booze and weed, he has forgotten the correct answer to the question, “What time is it?”

DiCaprio begs for an exception (don’t “nitpick over passwords” in a family emergency!) but the Millennial-aged revolutionary, sounding like a government bureaucrat or corporate call-center employee, is unyielding.

“ ‘What time is it?’ is a key question of the underground movement,” he tells DiCaprio. “Maybe you should have studied the rebellion text a little harder.” Then, he hangs up.

A character later provides the correct answer: “Time doesn’t exist, yet it controls us anyway.”

But as the film races around the Golden State, it never bothers to answer a similarly fundamental question: “Why are we here?”

Which is how “One Battle After Another” lost me.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.