Mikey Madison plays Ani in Anora.
No one could believe the weekend Sean Baker was having, least of all Sean Baker.
On Friday evening, the director and his close band of Anora collaborators sat through the entire Critics Choice Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, losing five awards in a row, when Sacha Baron Cohen ripped open an envelope and announced they’d won best picture.
“Oh my god!” a shocked Baker exclaimed at the table before giving a heartfelt speech, his voice shaking with emotion.
On Saturday night, he found himself onstage again at the Directors Guild Awards where he was roasted by his star, Mikey Madison, and the surprise recipient of the best director prize from last year’s winner, Christopher Nolan. He then raced across town to the Producers Guild Awards (inexplicably held the same night), walking in just in time to win best picture.
Suddenly, the Oscars punditry universe was alight with shocked reactions. What had seemed to be a wide-open Oscars race now felt close to shut.
Winning the PGA, DGA and CCA is quite a trifecta, particularly for a movie that Baker kept emphasising cost just US$6 million (NZ$10.5m) to make – the smallest budget of any best picture contender. Only three films have swept all three and lost the top Oscars prize (La La Land, Brokeback Mountain and Saving Private Ryan).
The PGA in particular is also a top prognosticator for the Oscars since both use ranked-choice ballots: 12 of the past 15 PGA winners also won best picture. Since 2000, only three DGA winners who were also nominated for the Oscar have failed to pick up a best director statuette.
Final Oscar voting started this week, and ends Tuesday, with only the Writers Guild of America Awards and the BAFTAs occurring before voting closes. With six Oscar nominations, in all the categories it was expected to be competitive, suddenly Anora is looking like the strongest contender in the field for the March 2 awards.
It’s also been an art house hit; its opening in October had the highest per-screen average of a limited-release movie in 2024, and so far it’s made US$36m (NZ$63m) worldwide. That’s largely been on the back of word of mouth – that the verite comedy is both thought-provoking and a riot to watch.
Anora follows Madison’s Ani, a young, foulmouthed Brighton Beach stripper and escort who gets spontaneously hitched to a Russian oligarch’s son (Mark Eydelshteyn), only to have all her dreams come crashing down when his parents send in a team of goons to break them up.
And yet somehow, even after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes and garnering positive reviews, it went 0 for 5 at the Golden Globes, as Emilia Perez and The Brutalist took top honours. Critics groups largely ignored both it and Madison’s blistering performance. So, how did this little independent film about a young sex worker have such an unexpected resurgence? Below, a few theories:
The dirty secret of most precursor awards is that they’re largely decided by people who aren’t members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Critics groups tend to highlight movies and performances they hope will get more attention, such as Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths and Carol Kane in Between the Temples (both of whom missed out on Oscar nominations).
The Golden Globes are decided by some 300 international entertainment journalists. The Academy, on the other hand, has 9905 voting members, all from within the film industry.
Awards pundits at trade magazines also tend to have more mainstream tastes than the Academy, which awarded Moonlight over La La Land for best picture in 2017 and Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron over Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse for animated feature last year.
Up until recently, Scott Feinberg of the Hollywood Reporter had September 5, a journalism thriller about the 1972 terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics with an Oscar nod for original screenplay, at the top of his list. Clayton Davis of Variety had been bullish on A Complete Unknown and Wicked.
Perhaps the “surge” wasn’t a surge, but an affirmation. It may be most instructive to look at awards ceremonies like the PGAs, DGAs, SAGs and BAFTAs not as predictors but as indicators of favor, while all the other precursors and pundits are like bookies placing wild, somewhat blind bets.
“In reality ... what happened is probably less of a case of Anora rallying than it is a simple matter of Oscar watchers learning more about what voters have probably been thinking all along,” writes Steve Pond of the Wrap. As Vanity Fair’s David Canfield put it, “From my vantage point it’s been out front all along, hiding in plain sight.”
In 2019, Neon bought Bong Joon-ho’s Korean-language social-class thriller Parasite at Cannes and carried it all the way to best director and best picture at the Oscars.
In an age when Shogun is constantly sweeping TV awards, it may be hard to remember that Parasite was the first non-English-language film to win the top prize. It was a long shot given the Academy’s Eurocentric history, not to mention a complete box-office smash. The reason we’ve all gotten over “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles,” as Bong put it, is because of that movie.
Since then, Neon has made it a point to become the American distributor for Palme d’Or winners, including Triangle of Sadness and Anatomy of Fall, both of which earned Oscar nominations. In doing so, the company has linked its brand with international quality; if Neon picks it up, you know it’s good. The company has also remained truly small and independent.
It focuses on one, maybe two, Oscar contenders per year, and gives them long theatrical windows. Treating the theatrical experience as sacred, and constantly screening Anora for Academy members, matters.
Also, among the Academy’s newer international voters, a stamp of approval from Cannes – as Anora and Emilia Perez have this year, and Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest had last year – is a major deal, and it may prove to be the precursor that matters the most.
The big weekend for Anora came on the heels of the high-profile implosion of the Emilia Perez Oscar campaign, following the surfacing of racist, Islamophobic tweets from that movie’s star, Karla Sofia Gascon. Did Emilia Perez, the most nominated film of the year with 13 Oscar nods, fall so Anora could rise?
It’s easy to draw parallels, since both films are carried by the work of a relatively unknown actress. But no, it’s not that linear. Voting for the CCAs and PGAs occurred before Gascón’s scandal broke, as did three of the four weeks of DGA voting. That means that industry veterans voted for Anora even before they were turned off by the Emilia Perez debacle – and after Anora lost at the Golden Globes.
It may just be that the industry does not want to reward Netflix: Roma, The Power of the Dog, All Quiet on the Western Front and Maestro all lost best picture. Movie insiders tend to balk at Netflix’s business practices, such as throwing so much money at filmmakers that independent distributors can’t compete, or only showing movies in theatres for the bare number of days to qualify for the Oscars before putting them online for the algorithm to surface.
A vote for Anora is, in essence, a vote for movies that are made by humans with original IP, and shown in theaters in a reverent fashion. Major studios, too, are guilty of eroding the theatrical experience. Wicked was in theatres just 40 days before it was available on home video.
Conclave waited two months. A24 has been better at holding the line, but The Brutalist, which the company bought out of Venice, is coming to home video less than two months after its limited release in theatres.
A24 is still an arbiter of daring, quality films, but it’s starting to become a behemoth, too, particularly after the many wins for Everything Everywhere All At Once two years ago. Whenever there’s an Oscars upset, the indie David almost always beats out the studio Goliath (Moonlight vs La La Land, or Spotlight vs The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road).
There’s a lot to be said for loyalty and being true to who you are in this industry of mercenaries. Baker is and always has been a fiercely independent filmmaker. He’d been making feature films for 15 years before he broke out with 2015’s Tangerine, about two trans sex workers in West Hollywood, shot entirely with iPhone 5S cameras.
His next two titles, The Florida Project, about a single mother and sex worker struggling in the shadow of Disney World, and Red Rocket, starring Simon Rex as a washed-up porn star, were both critically acclaimed but largely ignored by the Academy.
And still, Baker has continued doing what he’s doing, with a small family of collaborators that includes his wife, Samantha Quan, and former assistant, Alex Coco, as producers, and Armenian actor Karren Karagulian as a fixture in all his films – hilariously in Anora as a priest who also moonlights as an enforcer for Russian oligarchs.
Baker also crafts every aspect of his films himself, and shoots on 35mm. Come Oscar night, he has the potential to join an elite group of filmmakers who have won Oscars in four categories on the same night: picture, director, original screenplay and film editing.
Among his fellow best director nominees, he’s less scandal-tinged than Jacques Audiard of Emilia Perez, less commercial than James Mangold of A Complete Unknown, and more experienced than Brady Corbet of The Brutalist and Coralie Fargeat of The Substance. It’s hard to believe the man is 53, but he’s spent more than two decades pounding the boards on tiny movies, and gathering friends and respect along the way.
The Oscars have a well-earned reputation for pretension, but it’s important to remember that Academy voters are just moviegoers in the end. They vote for what moved them, what made them laugh, what made them cry.
“The movie is superficially a comedy – and ultimately a love story, just not the one we think,” The Post’s Ty Burr writes in his Anora review, “but there’s a great deal of striving and sadness beneath its layers of glitter and soot.”
Movie distributors tend to save their prestige movies for fall film festivals and open them at the end of the year, but that conventional wisdom may be crumbling.
A tiny movie like Baker’s, which premiered at Cannes in May and opened in theatres in September, benefited from audience members having time to watch it again and again, bring their friends, and have it swirling around in their heads as they took in the other big movies of the year.
The Wrap’s Pond wrote that even directors who lost at the Critics Choice Award seemed “delighted” that Anora had won. “If they had to lose, they were glad it was to Anora,” Pond added. Even those who don’t love it at least respect it.
While not political, it does tackle poignant themes about the exploitation of sex workers and people at the bottom of the wealth gap. As Katey Rich writes in the Ankler, “Anora is not the biggest box office hit in the race, but as an indie success story in a time that desperately needs them, it might have exactly the right message for the moment.”
The Hollywood star is 70 but has no plans to retire from acting.