The director Sean Baker probably didn’t predict this outcome while he was filming Anora, his latest small-budget indie project, in the snowy Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach—that a couple years later, he’d be accepting Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It was one of five prizes that his spiky indie dramedy collected on Hollywood’s biggest night. After a drawn-out awards season in which the biggest contenders seemed often in flux, Anora dominated at a fun if elongated Oscars ceremony. This year’s Best Picture winner also took home Best Director, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing. Four of those trophies went to Baker, tying a record for individual wins in a night with the legendary Walt Disney; Anora’s young star Mikey Madison received the Best Actress trophy, in a fairly shocking upset over the widely tipped-to-win Demi Moore.
Anora is an unconventional Oscar juggernaut. As Baker reminded audiences from the stage, it’s a true indie picture, made for $6 million and with no huge names in the cast. But after a triumphant debut at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won the coveted Palme D’Or, Anora continued marching toward industry-wide recognition. The movie’s success is the culmination of a career that’s seen Baker making the most of shoestring budgets and filming whole movies on an iPhone. But Anora—which bested blockbuster heavyweights like Wicked and traditional awards fare like A Complete Unknown—was an especially incongruous winner this year, as it received its flowers during a notably old-school Academy Awards ceremony. This year’s show reminded me of the extravagant, zingy celebrations of cinema from my youth, with a highly competent host leading the viewer through nearly four hours of speeches, montages, and musical numbers.
Some might see the event’s duration as a problem. Indeed, concerns over the Oscars’ length have led to some strange truncations of the show in recent years. (Remember in 2022 when the producers cut some awards categories from the live broadcast, presenting them before it began?) This year reused the 2024 ceremony’s fairly ingenious solution to the runtime problem: Just start the whole shebang earlier. The live broadcast started at 4 p.m. in Los Angeles, which meant even the comparably roomy proceedings wrapped up during primetime on the east coast. And though some familiar causes of bloat, such as performances of each of the Best Song nominees, were absent, nature abhors a vacuum and this year’s showrunners found plenty of other superfluous moments to include.
To be clear: I think the excess is great. The Oscars should be long, indulgent, and for the fans; the ceremony happens once a year, and it should be staged at the same absurd scale as something like the Super Bowl. Any attempt to impose rigor and order on them tends to backfire in some unexpected way anyway. This year, the show’s 97th edition, there was very little tweaking to the proven formula. Conan O’Brien served as emcee, about as seasoned a choice imaginable for a first-time host, and he did exactly what an Oscar host is supposed to do: tell pithy jokes about the nominees, do a couple of silly, scripted bits, and otherwise keep things moving with a smile on his face. O’Brien has been a pro at that sort of thing since I was in elementary school.
The choice of O’Brien as host also set the expectation that this was probably not going to be a politically charged Oscars. The comedian’s brand is more focused on irreverence than commentary; he offered one glancing gag noting that Anora is about “standing up to a powerful Russian,” but little else in that vein.. He took a couple of cheerful swipes at the Best Actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón over her past inflammatory tweets, but otherwise steered clear of Oscar politicking, too; this was not a night where it felt like an attendee might take the stage to slap a presenter. Instead, the tone was self-serious, yet still fun, as exemplified by musical numbers celebrating the leading ladies of Wicked, the recently deceased producer Quincy Jones, and the James Bond franchise.
These segments were conceptually loose—why was The Substance star Margaret Qualley suddenly onstage jerking her limbs to Paul McCartney’s Bond theme song “Live or Let Die”? I couldn’t really tell you, but the moment felt like the kind of forgettable, florid nonsense that graces even the most polished of Oscar ceremonies. Every year, the show’s producers try to think of new ways to celebrate movies, but the hoariest methods are usually best. There were some playful twists this year, however, such as performers addressing craft-award nominees directly to spotlight their work, or the stage opening up to reveal the orchestra playing the nominated scores.
But largely, Oscar night was pleasantly familiar, a respite after years of relatively chaotic ceremonies. This year’s event did have a little more pep to it than last year, when Oppenheimer swept the big awards, however. Several films picked up trophies: Behind Anora in number of wins was The Brutalist, which ended up taking three categories (Best Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Score). Dune: Part Two and Wicked each earned two technical trophies, while Emilia Pérez, the nomination leader, won for Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Song. Emilia Pérez’s turnout in particular was a fall from seeming dominance, perhaps precipitated by Gascón’s controversy.
Or perhaps not. Anora reigned supreme at many of the guild awards that presage the Oscars, which tend to be the best predictors of these things. Despite the film’s offbeat subject matter—about a sex worker who impulsively marries a Russian oligarch’s son—and its screenplay filled with hectoring insults and curse words, Anora is a screwball romantic comedy at its heart. Its story clearly spoke to the widest swathe of voters, even if many pundits predicted that the tonier, more highfaluting adult drama Conclave would emerge as a consensus winner. (That film, about a Papal conclave gathering to select a new Pope, had to make do with a sole win for Adapted Screenplay.)
Baker, a chipper presence each time that he took the stage, passionately read from a piece of paper for his Best Director win. He argued for the primacy of the theatrical experience, a message that he’s been pushing throughout this awards season. Intentionally or not, the show around him was doing the same, harkening back to an older Oscars vibe—before streaming cinema and shortened cinematic “windows” were a problem anyone in the audience had to deal with. Anora is currently one of the lowest-grossing Best Picture winners ever, but its $15 million domestic gross is a relative success for such a small-scale work in this day and age. Baker’s hope, which is one I share, is that his Oscar success will spur studios to re-evaluate the importance of both the moviegoing experience and art that reaches beyond big-budget homogeny. The Oscars, amidst all their silliness, remain one of the best ways to get people watching interesting films of all sizes.
