Anora Oscar win carries Academy Awards into a new era

Last fall, Sean Baker was sitting in a Manhattan restaurant, talking about a poll. The survey, about sex in movies and television, showed that Gen Z moviegoers were mostly turned off by sex in film.

“That broke my heart. I thought, there’s something wrong here,” said Baker. “You’re okay with all the violence that’s out there? Sex is a vital part of existence. Why don’t you want to see sex in our stories?”

“I remember being on set and being like: We’re pushing against that poll.”

When Baker’s Anora swept the 97th Academy Awards on Sunday, its five wins, including best picture, heralded a different kind of Oscar winner.

Anora, about an erotic dancer (Mikey Madison, the best actress winner) who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, is atypically sexually explicit for a best picture winner – a class that includes more staid movies like The King’s Speech and Driving Miss Daisy.

A young woman’s relationship to her own sexuality has not been, historically speaking, in the Oscars' wheelhouse.

But that’s just one quality that makes Anora unique as a best picture winner. The film, made for US$6 million (S$8.07 million) and distributed by Neon, was made with little interest in the mainstream. If anything, Anora was more oriented to the Cannes Film Festival, the French citadel of cinema, where it won the Palme d’Or last May – a prize that Baker said meant the most to him.

But, increasingly, these are converging movie worlds. In the last five years, four Palme d’Or winners have been nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards, including Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (also distributed by Neon), which became the first non-English language movie to win Hollywood’s top prize.

Anora, a film that inverts a Hollywood fairy tale like Pretty Woman, is – like many of the winners on Sunday – an unabashedly modern movie and a film comfortable, even proud of the label of “cinema”.

In a movie industry where manufactured franchise stewardship rules the day, Anora was celebrated, in part, because it's the real deal.

It's also a more traditional choice than it might seem. Baker, a filmmaker who has sworn off making a series, a studio film or anything for streaming, is an apostle of '70s cinema.

At an Oscars that host Conan O’Brien called the 97th Longform Content Awards, Anora – which shared some of the same Brooklyn streets as The French Connection – stood for upholding an increasingly threatened theatrical legacy, with Baker ardently defending a very old-fashioned thing: The big screen.

“Filmmakers, keep making films for the big screen. I know I will,” Baker said from the Dolby Theatre stage. “Distributors, please focus first and foremost on the theatrical releases of your films. Parents, introduce your children to feature films in movie theatres and you will be molding the next generation of movie lovers and filmmakers. And for all of us, when we can please watch movies in a theatre and let’s keep the great tradition of the moviegoing experience alive and well.”

The coronation of Anora was a triumph for independent moviemaking, but that’s also been a battle waged and won before. We’ve seen The Hurt Locker best Avatar and Moonlight defeat La La Land.

Last year’s crowning of Oppenheimer was, if anything, an exception in a string of smaller best pictures that haven't fit the Oscar mold. Everything Everywhere All At Once, the 2023 winner, was antic, lewd and about the furthest thing possible from “Oscar bait”.

What was different this year was that the stiffest competition for Anora wasn’t Wicked or Dune: Part Two or any other studio product. It was Conclave and The Brutalist. All of the major award winners on Sunday hailed from movies made independently. At the Oscars, the studios are out of the picture.

That trend has been developing for years, but the 97th Academy Awards showed just how much things have changed.

In the best animated category, where Universal and DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot was the heavy favourite, Flow, a wordless Latvian movie made with open-source software, triumphed instead.

“Any kid now has tools that are used to make these now Academy-winning films,” Flow director Gints Zilbalodis said backstage. “So I think we’re going to see all kinds of exciting films being made from kids who might not have had a chance to do this before.”

That win, like those for Anora, suggested the academy’s international voters have emerged as a dominant bloc. When the academy, reacting to pressure to diversify its ranks, brought in new members in recent years, it cast a wide net overseas. Hundreds of new international voters – people more likely to favour what succeeds in Cannes or Venice – now significantly sway the Oscars.

What does that mean for the Academy Awards going forward? A further tilt toward indie and arthouse cinema will surely alienate some viewers.

Anora, with US$16 million in domestic ticket sales, is one of the lowest-grossing best picture winners ever. Oscar producers did everything they could to lean into bigger films, opening with a lavish medley by Wicked stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, cutting repeatedly to a mascot sandworm from Dune: Part Two and even paying James Bond tribute.

The 007 musical number was oddly timed, coming on the heels of the franchise’s creative takeover by Amazon MGM Studios after decades of Broccoli family stewardship. It seemed to only highlight how much of Hollywood’s regular, day-to-day business of brand management lay outside the new Oscar landscape.

But just as assuredly as an Anora Academy Awards might turn some away, it could also inspire a new generation of cinephiles. Anora is at turns screwball farce, neorealistic drama, capitalism satire and devastating tragicomedy. It’s arguably one of the best best picture winners of recent years, a movie that tries on nearly every genre before concluding in an unforgettable scene that catapults Anora into something classic and outside of time.

What aftershocks will follow Baker's Oscar romp remains to be seen. But shortly after the Academy Awards concluded, 3.9 magnitude tremors were felt in nearby Burbank – a fitting coda for the small quake of Anora.