Sean Baker, winner of the awards for best original screenplay, best film editing, best director, and best picture for ‘Anora’, attends the Governors Ball after the Oscars
By the time the last Oscar statue was handed out yesterday, Sean Baker’s Anora had achieved something extraordinary: an indie darling standing atop Hollywood’s biggest stage, winning five awards including Best Picture. It was a moment of triumph for independent cinema and a culmination of the Academy’s recent push toward rewarding unconventional, off-the-wall films. But something about Sean Baker’s record-tying sweep felt uninspired, and refused to sit well.
The discourse surrounding Anora’s win has been as polarised as this controversial award season itself. While some heralded it as a win for street-level storytelling, others wondered how a film this minor in impact swept the biggest categories. To put it bluntly: Anora is a fine film, but it is neither an innovative work nor an urgent one. Long admired for his ability to weave heartfelt, character-driven narratives around marginalised lives in his earlier work, Baker has essentially repackaged his well-worn aesthetic for a mainstream, Oscar-baited audience. And yet, this “indie darling” managed to bulldoze past The Brutalist, Nickel Boys, The Substance and its only seeming competitor, Conclave — all films with grander ambitions, deeper thematic weight, and, frankly, more cinematic heft.
ALSO READ:How ‘Anora’ is leading the Best Picture race by simply outlasting the wreckage
There is something ironic about Anora winning Best Picture at a time when audiences and critics alike are yearning for films that truly push boundaries. Sure, its indie roots and outsider sensibilities play well in an era where the Academy is eager to signal its evolving tastes. But that evolution should be about substance, not just optics. Instead, Anora embodies a peculiar new Oscar trend: the scruffy underdog film that’s been carefully engineered by an aggressive campaign to win big.
Baker’s impassioned speeches at the Oscars were peppered with earnest gratitude and a rallying cry for independent cinemal and the communal theatrical exprerience. Yet, when Baker invoked the sex-working community as a cause célèbre, it was hard not to feel the gap between rhetoric and reality. It was the brand of Hollywood allyship that speaks at marginalised groups rather than with them.
Dedicating Anora to “all sex workers past, present, and future” was a grand gesture, but one that rang false when held up against the film itself. Mikey Madison’s Ani exists as a character in a limbo between authenticity and stereotype. She is presented as a force of nature, but what is she actually about? Unlike the richly drawn figures in Baker’s The Florida Project or Red Rocket, Ani remains frustratingly opaque, and her motivations unclear beyond a vague pursuit of security and class ascension. If Baker truly wanted to pay tribute to sex workers, perhaps he could have started by making a film that reckoned with their humanity first.
This is not to suggest that Anora is without its charms. Sean Baker remains a skilled conjurer of lived-in worlds, and the film’s early momentum crackles with an improvisational verve. There are moments of sharp humour, an electricity to its opening act, and a few deeply felt performances, particularly from Madison and Yura Borisov as the inscrutable Igor. But the film’s initial pull soon gives way to a more aimless inertia, as if running out of road before it knows where to turn. By the time its momentum drains in the end, it’s hard not to question whether that was really all.
Mikey Madison in a still from ‘Anora’
| Photo Credit:
Neon
The hollowness of Anora is particularly glaring when compared to its competitors.If Anora was the saccharine cocktail of American excess, some of its fellow Best Picture nominees presented something stronger, something that burned going down.
Brady Corbet has done with The Brutalist what Baker has continually gestured at as an afterthought during his award campaign — the cost of art, of independent art, where creativity is shackled to capital, and autonomy comes at the price of one’s own legacy. Corbet’s film immerses itself in the suffocating compromises artists make to survive, where a grand vision can be reduced to a commodity, reshaped by the very forces it sought to resist.
The Substance, meanwhile, is Anora’s critique of the fetishised Western lens on steroids, eviscerating the industry’s insatiable appetite for youth. And then there was the boundary-smashing reimagining of cinematic language that was RaMell Ross’s beautiful Nickel Boys. If Baker served up a riff on the American Dream, Ross interrogates whose dreams are even permitted to exist.
What Anora’s win really signifies is the Academy’s increasing desire to appear progressive in its selections while still rewarding the safest version of risk-taking. In recent years, the Oscars have leaned toward films that appear unconventional while still being deeply accessible — CODA, Nomadland, Everything Everywhere All at Once. Each of these films had genuine artistic merit, but they were probably also selected because they felt the most palatable to voter appetites.
Director Sean Baker and producers Alex Coco and Samantha Quan pose with the Oscars for “Anora” during the Governors Ball following the Oscars show at the 97th Academy Awards in Hollywood
Baker’s film fits this mold perfectly. It’s edgy enough to seem bold, sketchy enough to appear indie, but ultimately too lightweight to leave a lasting impression. It presents itself as a radical choice while adhering to familiar storytelling beats and gestures toward social commentary without saying anything particularly new.
And perhaps this is the real issue: Anora is a film that demands to be liked rather than truly engaged with. The irony of Baker’s Oscar dominance is that his past films have often felt more urgent and more authentic. Red Rocket was sharper. The Florida Project was more heartfelt. Tangerine was riskier. Anora feels like an artist tempering his own instincts to fit the mold of an “important” film.
The Academy’s embrace of indie cinema is commendable. But Anora is not Moonlight usurping La La Land. It is not Parasite rewriting the rules of what an Oscar winner can be. At best, it is a film that lucked into history.
Published – March 04, 2025 05:32 pm IST
