The cheers were loud and long at the 98th Academy Awards after “One Battle After Another” won best picture. It was a great night for the Paul Thomas Anderson-directed film, which nabbed six Oscars for its depiction of California revolutionaries taking on a white supremacist federal government hell-bent on deporting undocumented immigrants and crushing dissent. Wait, isn’t that what CNN airs every night? The 2.5-hour-plus film didn’t do well at the U.S. box office, not even earning back its estimated $130-million budget. But it sparked dozens of thought pieces that kept it in the national conversation long after it left...