“I don’t think it’s in the mix for Best Picture,” an Academy member told me about Anora back in January. This was the day after the Oscar nominations, which marked the second-act setback of Anora’s journey to the Best Picture podium. Sean Baker’s film had earned six nominations: the most it could have hoped for, but shy of the double-digit numbers posted by The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez. Those films had also been the big winners of the Golden Globes, where Anora blanked entirely. Eight months after their big Palme d’Or win at the Cannes Film Festival, it looked like Baker & Co. had run out of gas.
But it wasn’t just the nominations that spurred doubts about Anora. “It’s a bit too risqué for Best Picture,” this member told me. They meant this not as a criticism of the film, but of the rest of the Academy: For a purportedly liberal body, its membership had notably conservative tastes, particularly around sex. A strip-club dramedy that hadn’t blown up the box office, from a director whose films had never been embraced by Oscar before? Even for people who loved Anora, it was easy to see it as a Best Picture also-ran, the kind of film that could maybe win a screenplay trophy but was never in serious contention for the top Oscar.
So, how did Baker’s film overcome the skeptics and wind up the champion of the whole Oscar pole dance? The answer is a story of how the Academy is changing, and how we may all need to update our mental model of what a Best Picture winner looks like.
To start, we need to flash back to last May. Despite being overlooked by the Academy, Baker by now had established himself as one of Cannes’ guys. The Florida Project debuted in the Directors Fortnight sidebar, while Red Rocket had seen him jump to the main Competition. Before the 2024 festival began, Anora’s presence in the lineup was noted, but considering Baker’s paltry Oscar track record, the film was hardly treated as a potential awards breakout. Things changed once Anora premiered to widespread acclaim, as critics hailed the film’s frenetic energy and spotlighted Mikey Madison’s breakout performance. But the Palme d’Or win, from a jury headed by Greta Gerwig, truly kicked Anora into overdrive. As the Academy has grown ever more international, it is now the Cannes crowd who set the tone for the subsequent Oscar season. With the exception of something really out there, like the 2021 car-fucking extravaganza Titane, if you can play on the Croisette, you’ll play with voters. The Cannes jury bestowing their imprimatur on Anora didn’t just mark it as a contender, they also happened to shore up its biggest weakness. Usually, a film this raucous and raunchy might struggle to be taken seriously. Winning the most prestigious prize in global cinema meant that, when Anora arrived on the scene in the fall, it automatically felt more prestigious than, say, Hustlers, which was never able to capitalize on its own festival buzz.
In awarding Anora the Palme, Gerwig pointed to the film’s debt to screwball comedies of yore, crediting Baker for reviving the spirit of “Ernst Lubitsch or Howard Hawks.” That speaks to another difference from Baker’s earlier work. While his three Cannes premieres form an unofficial trilogy about sex work, capitalism, and labor, there’s no doubt that Anora is the most Academy-friendly of the bunch. It’s got a more sympathetic protagonist than Red Rocket, and none of the freak-show undercurrents of The Florida Project. Rhythmically, too, it stands apart. Florida Project plays like a series of vignettes, while Red Rocket is mostly a hangout movie. Anora, as Gerwig said, sported a more classic narrative structure: Girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl looks for boy, girl finds new boy that’s been there all along.
Anora also had another benefit that The Florida Project and Red Rocket didn’t — namely, that it was coming after The Florida Project and Red Rocket. Baker is older than you’d think, and he’s been working longer than you think. His first feature, Four Letter Words, came out back in the year 2000. But the first decade-plus of his career played out in obscurity; it wasn’t until 2015’s Tangerine, famously shot on an iPhone, that he got on the radar of the wider industry. He’d always been respected in indie circles. (“Talk about a fucking avatar of purity,” the filmmaker Kel O’Neill once told me.) Three films and nine years later, he’d finally become a known quantity in the mainstream.
Once voters are comfortable with a filmmaker, they make more allowances for their idiosyncrasies. This is a matter of timing, and it’s hard to predict. The Academy didn’t respond to Guillermo del Toro’s creature features, or Yorgos Lanthimos’s deadpan dialogue, until suddenly, with Shape of Water and The Favourite, they did. Similarly, voters had time to get acclimated to Baker’s unique style: his run-and-gun cinematography, his nonjudgemental view of sex work, his lack of the usual arthouse piety. In Anora in particular, the most extreme elements benefit from Baker’s knife-edge command of tone. The scene where the titular character fends off three goons is plenty harrowing — you never lose sight of the fact this young woman is in a physical altercation with three very large men — but Baker also takes care to break the tension with a laugh line, or a pitch-perfect reaction shot, the very elements that helped him earn Best Editing earlier in the night.
All of these winning quantities were no secret. Anora came into awards season with plenty of buzz, and in a year without an Oppenheimer-size juggernaut, it was anointed the early favorite almost by default. From the jump, it seemed like the kind of movie that would benefit from the Oscars’ preferential ballot. In the era of the expanded Best Picture category, the top prize typically goes to the most likable contender, rather than the most dazzling achievement, and most awards-season observers agreed that Anora was this season’s Miss Congeniality. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, it was the consensus pick to become the consensus pick.
Anora spent the fall atop the Best Picture leaderboard, which is usually a perilous place to be. Like most early front-runners, it was eventually toppled — in this case, when the film blanked at the Globes. But that setback may have been a blessing in disguise. While Emilia Pérez and The Brutalist spent January fending off controversies, Anora kept its head down, and still got to feel like an Oscar underdog. Anora’s likability also helped the film enjoy a more positive information environment than other contenders. Few reporters wanted to ruin the vibes by asking Baker about his Twitter likes; fewer still wanted to get Russian actors Yura Borisov or Mark Eydelsteyn in trouble by asking their views on the war in Ukraine.
As Neon’s unquestioned No. 1 priority, the film was also carefully shepherded. In Best Actress, Madison ran a successful ingénue campaign that harkened back to the glory days of the 2010s, when discoveries like Jennifer Lawrence routinely took the trophy. Though everyone noted that Madison was nothing like her character, they liked the person they met: an enthusiastic young cinephile who was an ambassador from the Letterboxd Generation. Baker, who did more winning at the precursors, used his acceptance speeches to hammer home a specific message about the importance of the theatrical window, a theme he reiterated on Oscar night, when he became the first person since Walt Disney to win four awards in a single night. Earlier indie auteurs on the Oscar trail, your Quentin Tarantinos and Lars Von Triers, posed as revolutionaries; Baker sold himself as a steward of the art form.
But ultimately, the primary reason Anora won is because this is not the same Oscars as it was ten years ago. Alongside Moonlight, Parasite, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, Anora will instantly go down as a “new Academy” pick — films that never would have won had the Academy not expanded their membership in the wake of the #OscarSoWhite scandal. These four films span a wide range of plots, settings, and themes, but what they do share is a certain boldness. These are not the safe, down-the-middle Oscar winners of yore; they are gritty, scrappy movies. Two years ago, after EEAOO won, I noted that underneath all the jokes about butt plugs, the film held an Academy-friendly heart. Anora is even less of a typical Best Picture winner. EEAOO ends with a hug; Anora ends on a muted, downbeat note that’s hard to pin down — and equally hard to shake. In the end, Anora’s heart and energy proved appealing enough that voters didn’t hold anything against it. As one Oscar strategist repping the competition told me, “This is a feel-good movie. You come out of it feeling hopeful about humanity.”