On Sunday night, “Anora” director Sean Baker made Academy Awards history by winning four Oscars in the same year for the same film, collecting gold statues for Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing.
How did Baker do what other legendary directors, whose films have won twice as many Oscars, could not? How unique is it that he wears so many hats? And is there anything to be gleaned from his four wins as the Oscars continue the trend of increasing the premium on auteur-driven filmmaking?
A director winning Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay is not unusual. If Baker didn’t win Best Original Screenplay category this year, another director would have: Brady Corbet (“The Brutalist”), Jesse Eisenberg (“A Real Pain”), Coralie Fargeat (“The Substance”), and Tim Fehlbaum (“September 5”).
A director winning Best Picture has also become common. Of the 10 nominated films for Best Picture this year, “Anora” was one of six in which the director was also among the producers nominated for Best Picture. In the last two years, Best Director Oscar winners Christopher Nolan and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert also took home Oscars as producers of the Best Picture winner.
Baker’s win for the Best Editing Oscar is rare, but not unprecedented. Six times in the last 50 years, a director was nominated for Best Editing. Two won — but in both cases, the director was part of a multi-editor nomination. In 1998, director James Cameron won Best Editing, along with Conrad Buff and Richard A. Harris for “Titanic,” and in 2014, director Alfonso Cuarón won Best Editing along with Mark Sanger for “Gravity.” Cuarón received another editing nom, this time with Alex Rodríguez for “Children of Men in 2006, but didn’t win.
Major directors who make Oscar-nominated films are often highly active in the editing room, but they also have well-established editorial collaborations. This is why the two editors with the most Oscar nominations (nine and eight) and wins (three), Thelma Schoonmaker and Michael Kahn, are part of longtime creative partnerships with prolific directors, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Schoonmaker famously said her Oscars half-belonged to Scorsese.
While this is part of the great editor’s acute humility about her own incredible talents, this speaks to how intertwined editing is with a director’s game plan — and to how integral and present a director like Scorsese is in the editing room. And so while the contribution of a director like Scorsese (who was an accomplished editor early in his career) in the editing process is immeasurable and hard to delineate from Schoonmaker’s individual contribution, going so far as to take an editing credit, like Cameron and Cuarón, is extremely rare.
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Directors like Cameron and Cuarón taking editing credit may also not be the best awards strategy. Editors, who pick the nominees, don’t love seeing directors encroach on their peers’ credits, regardless of how well-earned it might be. Meanwhile, Academy voters increasingly like to spread the wealth across films. If a filmmaker is already predicted to win Best Director, they might look at editing as a way to reward another of their favorite films.
The other three times a director was nominated for Best Editing are potentially more instructive of Baker’s path. Directors Joel and Ethan Coen, under their editing alias Roderick Jaynes, were nominated for their editing of “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men.” Most recently, director Chloé Zhao was the sole editor nominated for “Nomadland” in 2021. Interestingly, “No Country for Old Men” and “Nomadland” scored both the Coens and Zhao Best Picture and Best Director Oscar wins, with Coens also winning Best Adapted Screenplay — a category Zhao was nominated in, but lost.
Like Baker, the Coens have been editing their films themselves since the beginning of their careers — although it should be noted that when the brothers went solo, Joel took on a new co-editor in Lucian Johnston on “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” and Ethan handed the editor role over entirely to Tricia Cooke on “Drive-Away Dolls.”
Baker, like the Coens, is from a total-filmmaker tradition. His cohorts include director/editors like Steven Soderbergh (who also shoots his movies), Frederick Wiseman (who holds the boom mic while directing camera), and, on his smaller productions, David Lynch (who also did his own sound design). These filmmakers have hands-on involvement at all levels of production rather than delegating and directing. With Baker, that also means casting — a credit that is significantly rarer than editor for a director in the U.S..
This total filmmaker approach grows out of student and indie filmmaking. Finding a director/editor at SXSW or Sundance is far more common than at the Oscars. Many directors in school or early in their careers establish key collaborations with cinematographers but edit their own work. Directors are encouraged not to take on an additional on-set duty, like lighting, because their time and focus need to be on directing and working with actors in particular. They can edit independent of other movie responsibilities and making editorial decisions as is often a key aspect of their education and growth.
The same applies when they make their first indies; low-budget productions can’t afford to hire a high-caliber editor for a lengthy edit. The multi-month grind of long, solitary hours and deadlines is also incompatible with the deferred pay model that many crew members working on 20-30-day indie shoots accept.
There are plenty of directors who learn their trade and build careers editing their films. Over time, if they are so lucky and talented, they attract a high-caliber editors; meanwhile their managers, financiers, producers, and mentors strongly encourage them to make the leap to handing over editing duties.
Recent Oscar nominees RaMell Ross (“Nickel Boys,” 2025 Oscars) and Garrett Bradley (“Time,” 2022 Oscars) talked about their initial apprehension of taking on an editor while on the Toolkit podcast, but both said taking the leap opened up their nominated work in ways they couldn’t have imagined. This path is the most common. Soderbergh, a professionally trained editor, worked with legendary editors Anne V. Coates and Stephen Mirrione before re-assuming editing duties after becoming an Oscar-winning director.
Zhao’s nomination also offers an interesting insight into Baker’s path to Oscar-winning director/editor. Similar to Baker’s filmography, her first three features utilized first-time performers whose characters were based on lived experience, a small and agile crew, and room for improvisation and experimentation. With “Nomadland,” Zhao originally planned to do first pass of the edit herself before bringing on an editor, as she did with her previous film “The Rider.”
Zhao told IndieWire in 2021 that she and her producers liked her first rough cut, but worried about what might be lost with bringing on an editor. Zhao found authenticity in holding on her non-professional actors essentially playing themselves, but also knew these moments might be considered hard to watch by some. A professional editor’s instinct might be to smooth over those moments by leaning on sharper performances from Frances McDormand and David Strathairn to frame coverage of the other performers.
Zhao’s aim was not uncommon for world cinema, but in Hollywood, every frayed edge gets polished and there’s a premium on using the form to ease the viewer’s experience. “Nomadland” was not the typical Oscar film; its triumph in 2021 was, at the time, dismissed as a byproduct of the first year of COVID when studios held back theatrical releases and their most likely Oscar plays.
However, indie Best Picture wins over the last nine years pack a different and distinctly non-Hollywood punch. The $1.5 million-budgeted “Moonlight,” the delirious chaos of Daniels’ “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and now “Anora” — these films no longer seem like Oscar outliers. They’re a product of the new 6,045 Academy voters who are younger, more diverse, and more international. In this context, Baker’s triumph — and the fact he still edits his films — make more sense.
That said, Baker’s path, eight features into his career, is as original as his films. Whether or not you think “Anora” is his best film (I’m still team “The Florida Project”), it’s remarkable to see how his cinematic storytelling has evolved. There has been a conscious effort to embrace elements of comedic storytelling and to make the ride more fun while maintaining the same themes: exploration of characters living on the margins of society (“chuckling at the absurdity of things that should be taken seriously,” as Baker told IndieWire) and an approach to production that embraces the stylized and nonfiction realism in the same film.
Just take the first two scenes of “Anora.” An opening-credit sequence, inspired by the sexploitation films of Tinto Brass, is the most stylized moment in any of Baker’s films — the slow-motion camera timed to the music, the color, the movement all embodying the duality of celebrating the stripper’s lifestyle, but also how they are objects from the customer’s perspective. As the movie starts, we are on the floor of the strip club watching Ani (Oscar winner Mikey Madison) on her hustle and in a very different movie. Baker created a scenario, with Madison mic’d up and on a long lens, where she could improv trying to lure customers into a private dance in the back. It’s a page out of a Ross Brothers film, shot and edited like a work of nonfiction.
“Conclave” director Edward Berger captured the duality of Baker’s direction and editing as well as anyone, when he told IndieWire what impressed him about “Anora”: “The journey of a woman who performs what is expected of her to find a kernel of truth in raw emotion is such a wild ride of pure energy and fun. I love Sean Baker’s carefree gaze, every part of his frame feels real and of the moment while the camera stays so nonchalantly observant. It all feels thrown away while never haphazard. In the chaos there is restraint, and that is a sign of pure cinematic mastery.”
That those two scenes fit comfortably alongside each other in Baker’s films, as does verbal comedy descending into the somber and emotional gut-punch of an ending, is something Baker makes work in his head while writing and directing a movie before delivering it in his editing room. This is true of most great directors, except most lack the expertise of being a top-level editor who can deliver the best version of it.
Baker’s editing Oscar is not simply a product of being the one who best understands his vision, he’s also a really good editor — rare for anyone, including a director.
