The refrain, sung by Take That, that opens “Anora” (Neon) — “Today this could be the greatest day of our lives” — sounds like a manifestation of the Palme d’Or winner’s awards campaign over the course of the last 24 hours. On Saturday night, two guild award wins, Best Picture at the PGA and Best Director at the DGA, followed the surprise Best Film win at Friday’s 2025 Critics Choice Awards.
After a wide field of six Best Picture contenders, we finally have a frontrunner in the Oscar race.
During the customary DGA acceptance speech before the announcement of the winner at the end of the night, “Anora” helmer Sean Baker expressed his admiration for his guild peers, and made another plea for theatrical distribution similar to what he stated at the CCAs. “Let’s do whatever we can do for us feature filmmakers to expand that theatrical window again; demand it. Let’s get it back to what it used to be,” said Baker. “At least 90 days, and really support movie theaters.”
That is apt campaign messaging, given that the last two Best Picture winners, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Oppenheimer,” were box office success stories that proved audiences still had an appetite for non-franchise films. After winning the Theatrical Feature Film award at the DGAs, Baker thanked Neon for “putting everything into the theatrical release, supporting a long theatrical window from the very first day we won at Cannes.”
The studio already has one Best Picture win under its belt with “Parasite,” which started Neon’s five year streak of distributing the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, with “Anora” being the latest, and fourth of the bunch to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. When it was released in October 2024, “Anora” became the most successful platform release of the year so far ($34 million worldwide).
“Anora” boasts both international and stateside appeal as an American Palme d’Or winner, the first since “Tree of Life” in 2011. That’s a positive, as some 10,000 Oscar voters are 20 percent international. That said, the Golden Globes, which have a similar global demographic (of journalists, not filmmakers) awarded “Anora” nothing during its January ceremony.
The PGA and DGA wins could not have come at a better time, as these first televised speeches for “Anora” are likely the last ones Academy members will hear before final Oscar voting opens on Tuesday, February 11. These wins give “Anora” momentum.
Those who harbored hopes for “Wicked,” “Conclave,” “A Complete Unknown,” “The Brutalist,” or the beleaguered “Emilia Pérez” now have confirmation of a crowdpleaser that plays to the mainstream as well as critics and cinephiles.
“Anora” is also nominated at the WGA and BAFTA Awards, which both occur before final Oscar voting closes on February 18. Baker has two more chances to win Best Original Screenplay for the film, and his star Mikey Madison and supporting player Yura Borisov have the chance to win their first televised award at the latter ceremony.
That said, “The Substance” star and Globe and CCA winner Demi Moore got the most applause of any presenter at the DGA Awards 2025, before she handed the Michael Apted Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in First-Time Theatrical Feature Film to “Nickel Boys” director RaMell Ross.
CCA winner Moore will likely shine at the SAG Awards on February 25, where “Anora” has another shot for some wins for Best Ensemble, Madison, and Borisov. The fact that breakout Borisov landed those supporting nods is a sign of strength for the movie.
The “Anora” DGA win rippled through the lengthy PGA Awards ceremony at the Fairmont Century Plaza, and sure enough, “Anora” took the final win, as producer/director/writer Baker, who had run over from the DGAs, thanked his producers, wife Samantha Quan and Alex Coco. It was a good night.
The significant thing about the PGA win: like the Oscars, it’s a preferential ballot. That means that the voters rank their choices and during that process, “Anora” rose to the top. They like it, they really like it.
Another Oscar prediction you can take to the bank, despite a lot of affection for low-budget Latvian film “Flow,” Universal’s CCA and PGA winner “The Wild Robot” will win Best Animated Feature at the Oscars. And the documentary Oscar race is as opaque as ever, as the PGA winner, “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” wasn’t nominated. On the other hand, nominee “Porcelain War” took the DGA win.
While the PGA has already raised $450 million for folks who lost their homes in the Los Angeles fires, the oft-repeated plea of the night was to return production to Los Angeles. Amen.
