Parents Are Not Okay in This Year's Golden Globes Contenders

If you’ll allow us to spoil the ending to one of this year’s leading Best Picture contenders for just a second, One Battle After Another ends with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob lying back on his couch, joint in mouth, after proudly waving his teenage daughter off as she heads out to join an anti police brutality protest 3 hours away.

It’s one of the more hopeful endings to the many films about parenting that have decorated the box office this year, but in the preceding two hours and 40 minutes, Paul Thomas Anderson certainly joins other writers and directors of 2025 films in their interrogation of the pitfalls of modern parenthood.

It’s only fitting then that One Battle After Another topped the 2026 Golden Globes nominations with nods in nine categories, but it’s far from the only film about parenting holding its own in the upcoming award season.

Jennifer Lawrence is among the Best Actress nominees for her visceral depiction of postpartum depression and the agony of settling into domestic life in Die My Love. She will compete in the drama category alongside Jessie Buckley for her role in Hamnet. In it, Buckley is a grieving mother whose daily responsibilities to her family do not stop amid the pain of losing one of her young kids.

The heartbreaking parts of bringing a child into the world and losing one are represented in the drama categories, so it’s up to the comedy category to demonstrate the vicious anxiety of keeping one alive. Rose Byrne does this flawlessly in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a film about a mother who is forced to move into a motel with her chronically ill daughter after the ceiling of their apartment caves in. Based on its writer-director Mary Bronstein’s real-life experience, Byrne’s character drinks cheap wine while hiding in the bathroom and buckles under the pressure of caregiving without adequate support.

Joachim Trier, who became a father for the first time in the years since his breakout film, The Worst Person in the World, is back on the awards circuit with Best Picture nominee Sentimental Value, an emotionally expansive tale of two daughters reconciling with their estranged father.

Trier told Vanity Fair that the polarizing nature of the socio-political situation across the globe prompted him to “look inward at what we are trying to protect in a world that’s getting quite brutal.”

Looking outward, though, seems to be what led Anderson to arrive at One Battle After Another, in which DiCaprio plays a washed-up radical living off the grid in a near-constant marijuana induced high who is pulled back into his past when a military official targets his daughter. Anderson, a dad of four young adults, posits raising kids to fight the powers that be as one of the greatest acts of resistance one can do in our times.

Even in films that are not focused on parenting, the act of raising or not raising kids seeps in.

In Marty Supreme, a Best Picture contender that also earned nominations for Timothée Chalamet and writer-director Josh Safdie, fatherhood is the cloud that looms over Marty’s career, threatening his ping-pong ambitions. “I have a purpose. It puts me at a huge life disadvantage,” Marty tells his pregnant girlfriend in a script written by Ronald Bronstein, the husband of If I Had Leg I’d Kick You’s writer and director.

In Eva Victor’s directorial debut, Sorry, Baby, a poignant ending scene sees her character wrestle with bringing an innocent child into a brutal world. The role earned her a Best Actress nomination.

Family life has been a source of screenplay inspiration for decades, but even as fewer people are having kids than ever before, parenthood remains an apt lens through which to interrogate the world. Nothing makes even the biggest, most fear-inducing issues in the world feel closer to home than raising a kid who may have to experience them, and no one conquers these fears more often than parents.