Whatever you think of ‘Anora,’ it’s not the traditional middlebrow drama that has dominated in years past. A hipper, more adventurous Academy is redefining what “Oscars bait” really means.
Last night at the 97th Academy Awards, Hollywood gave a fairy-tale ending to a movie without one. The belle of the ball was Anora, Sean Baker’s uproariously funny, achingly sad tragicomedy about a Brighton Beach exotic dancer chasing her dreams of storybook domestic bliss. The film picked up five Oscars, including the coveted Best Picture. The cognitive dissonance peaked when Mikey Madison took the stage to accept Best Actress, a prize she was not widely expected to win. There the young star was, completing her award season Cinderella story for playing a character whose own Cinderella story crumbles before our eyes. Everything Anora the character deserved, Anora the movie secured.
Baker’s stress-machine farce, which premiered nearly a year ago to rave reviews at the Cannes Film Festival, entered the evening with precedent on its side—only three times in the past 25 years has a film won top prize at the Producers Guild and the Directors Guild Awards and lost Best Picture. Even as the presumed front-runner, though, Anora exceeded all expectations. The writing was really on the wall halfway through the show, when Baker won his second Oscar of the evening for Best Editing—a category that had him competing against fellow Best Picture contender Conclave. By the end, Baker had four statuettes to his name, the record for the most Academy Awards won by a single filmmaker for one film over a single night. In the immortal, paraphrased words of Sally Field, they like him, they really like him.
Audacious in structure, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure, Anora might really be the best movie of the year. How often can you say that about the Best Picture winner? Certainly, it’s the worthiest recipient of this award since … well, OK, a year ago, when Christopher Nolan made a multiplex event out of the scientific and ethical quandaries of the Manhattan Project. But if Oppenheimer represented the platonic ideal of a traditional Oscar movie—a Great Man biopic radically fractured into a memory poem of guilt—Anora represents something else entirely. What its victory reinforces is that the days when the Oscars predominately celebrated safe, burnished, damnably respectable middlebrow dramas are basically over. The Academy, against all odds, has acquired good taste.
You wouldn’t guess that from how people still talk about the Oscars. The perception of Hollywood’s most prestigious voting body as hopelessly square and milquetoast has endured, even as the kind of movie the Academy honors has steadily shifted. An organization that once failed to nominate Do the Right Thing for Best Picture (to name one egregious example) made room in the lineup this year for not just Anora but also Nickel Boys, The Brutalist, and The Substance—formally or conceptually bold films that defy yesterday’s archetypal profile of an “Oscar movie.” The cliché that the Academy loves easily digested pap is as behind the times as what it used to nominate.
The change in sensibilities can be traced back about a decade, when the outrage over two consecutive years of entirely white acting nominees forced the Academy to reckon with the hegemony of its voting body. The #OscarsSoWhite movement successfully provoked a fundamental reshaping of the Academy, which doubled in size over the past 10 years and grew less white, less male, less old, and more international in the process. This membership drive didn’t just diversify the makeup of the group. It expanded and refined its tastes, as a more global Academy looked beyond the boundaries of Hollywood cinema to more adventurous visions.
A quick glance at the past 10 years’ worth of Best Picture winners, never mind the also-rans, reveals generally hipper preferences. Beyond Oppenheimer (which, again, is traditionally up the Academy’s alley in terms of subject matter rather than approach), the only truly old-school Best Picture of this period is Green Book, a vintage condescending white-savior melodrama whose victory seemed like the dying gasp of what you could call the old Academy. Otherwise, the past decade has given us plenty of unprecedented choices, from the most genuinely indie, low-budget winner ever (Moonlight) to the first winner in a language other than English (Parasite) to dabblings in fantasy and sci-fi (The Shape of Water, Everything Everywhere All at Once). These movies would have been lucky to even get nominated in earlier years. Even cozy CODA was a first for the Academy, the only winner ever plucked from the Sundance Film Festival.
In the case of Anora, the precedent it sets lies in explicitness. As Oscar host Conan O’Brien noted last night, it’s the second-most profane Best Picture nominee ever, with only The Wolf of Wall Steet using the word fuck more (and this includes the work of Quentin Tarantino, who handed Baker the Best Director prize). It’s also difficult to think of a Best Picture winner with more sex; Anora makes Midnight Cowboy, another portrait of struggling New York City sex workers (handed an X rating in its day, no less), look chaste by comparison. Baker explores Ani’s life as a stripper and an escort with a frankness that stands out during a time when mainstream American cinema is increasingly shrinking away from any depictions of sex or amorous desire.
Of course, setting precedent alone isn’t a mark of value. Whether the Oscars have “gotten it right” this past decade is a matter as subjective as the first-person POV adopted by Nickel Boys. Like any film that’s won Best Picture, Anora has inspired discerning dissent—from those suspicious of Baker’s interest in the sex worker community, or those convinced he doesn’t give Madison’s Ani enough of an interior life, or those more skeeved out than amused by the film’s bravura kidnapping centerpiece. But would any Anora skeptic go as far as insisting that the film plays it safe? Even they would have to concede that Baker’s subversion of the Pretty Woman playbook is more daring (and daringly downbeat) than anything once considered safely within the Academy’s wheelhouse. Does the term “Oscar bait” even mean anything anymore when something like Anora (or Parasite or Moonlight) can clean up handily at the ceremony?
After this year, it’ll be difficult to keep making the same old arguments and jokes about the Academy’s supposed stuffiness. After all, it’s not as though there wasn’t a genuinely, well, orthodox contender to rally around. Conclave was right there! Edward Berger’s talky, campy Vatican melodrama is Oscar friendly in the classic sense: a respectable middlebrow drama about faith and democracy, starring distinguished veterans of stage and screen delivering easily excerpted speeches and the occasional catty bon mot. To entertain the delusion (as yours truly did) that it might have beaten the Vegas odds and defied blogger predictions to take home Best Picture was to cling to an outdated notion of what the organization seems to value. The very fact that Conclave looks like a movie that could have won in any year or decade might actually be one reason that it lost.
As always, the Oscars are best understood as a snapshot of where Hollywood is at a given moment and how the industry prefers to be perceived. The steady improvement in the Academy’s annual selections reflects the reality of an age when any hope of elevating “serious” or “important” movies lies outside a studio system increasingly devoted only to franchise paydays. Anora is but the latest Best Picture winner to demonstrate that the creative epicenter of relatively mainstream American cinema is now boutique distributors like Neon and A24 or the streaming arms of Amazon and Apple. All of these companies have found a relatively healthy market for movies like Anora or the box office sensation that was Everything Everywhere All at Once. With the mid-budget film all but extinct, a prestige-hungry Hollywood turns its golden spotlight onto slightly weirder, bolder, and cooler releases.
Maybe the secret truth is that the Academy is looking for an old Hollywood in the new indie landscape. Anora may be viscerally modern, even topical in its focus on the way oligarchs have tightened their vise grip around working-class Americans, but it’s also a film that calls back to the values of yesterday’s studio fare—to the screwball spirit of Golden Age comedies and to the grittiness of New Hollywood character studies. The film almost seems to have emerged from a reality where cinema skipped straight from the 1970s until now, right past 50-plus years of blockbusters.
During his multiple trips to the stage, Baker himself underscored a kind of mass pining for what movies used to be—for the fabled, increasingly endangered “theatrical experience” and for a healthier, more eclectic movie ecosystem where it’s still possible to make a living making real cinema, as opposed to feeding the franchise machine. By throwing prizes at Anora and Parasite and even the mega-budget anomaly of Oppenheimer, the Academy is casting its vote for a future as comforting as the fairy tale Ani allows herself to believe: one where real movies still matter, and where people treat them like events, not mere content to stream and forget.
A.A. Dowd is a writer and editor based in Chicago. His work has appeared in such publications as The A.V. Club, Vulture, and Rolling Stone. He is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.
