Thoughts on Anora Winning Best Picture
How often can you say that the best movie of the year actually wins Best Picture? Looking back through the last decade of winners it’s hard to answer that question in the affirmative. Last year, Oppenheimer represented the platonic ideal of a traditional Oscar movie—a Great Man biopic made unique by its nonlinear structure. Anora, a film I very much do not like, represents something else entirely. What its victory reinforces is that the days when the Oscars predominately celebrated safe, burnished, damnably respectable middlebrow dramas might be over. The Academy, against all odds, has acquired better 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 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 other nominees, 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, a masterpiece) to the first winner in a language other than English (Parasite, another masterpiece) to dabblings in fantasy and sci-fi (The Shape of Water, Everything Everywhere All at Once, two movies I cannot stand). These movies would have been lucky to even get nominated in earlier years. Even cozy CODA (another suckfest) 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, 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. I don’t think Baker’s intentions are all that valorous but that’s me. The point still stands.
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 (me), or those convinced he doesn’t give Madison’s Ani enough of an interior life (me, again), or those more skeeved out than amused by the film’s bravura kidnapping centerpiece (a scene that’s 20 minutes long and should be 2). 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 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.
