ANORA All Along
Plus: 10 great movies that weren't even nominated.
“Momentum doesn’t ‘shift’ in an Oscar race,” tweeted Kris Tapley, the erstwhile Oscar pundit whose blog was one of my most trusted sources in the first years I followed the race. “It’s revealed.”
He was responding to a weekend in February where it seemed like the ultimate Best Picture winner, Anora, snapped into place with victories from the Critics Choice Awards, Directors Guild, and Producers Guild. The film’s awards season hopes seemed at risk of evaporating after it got blanked by the Golden Globes, which are becoming a less accurate predictor with each passing year. (In the last six years, there have been as many Palme d’Or winners that have gone on to win the Oscar for Best Picture as there are Golden Globe winners for Best Picture.)
I always maintained a sneaking sensation that Anora would prevail, even when it seemed like The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez (thank god), and Conclave each had legitimate claims to the throne. It was always the kind of film that would benefit from a preferential ballot because it engendered wide support. But even I underestimated how deep the love would run. Sean Baker made history as the first person to win four Oscars for the same film in a year, and the film’s groundswell of admiration even got Mikey Madison over the line in Best Actress for the night’s biggest shock win.
Anora’s path to victory wound up being not entirely dissimilar from Oppenheimer’s last year, and kudos to the team at Neon for recognizing the narrative they could build back in May of last year. In many ways, Sean Baker provides a low-budget B-side of Christopher Nolan’s winning campaign. Here’s someone who loves making movies for the big screen and was even willing to shoot a whole movie on a literal iPhone a decade ago. He’s a vocal champion for theatrical experience at a time when that exhibition style is under threat, and he has managed to stay true to his principles and interests while laboring strenuously to get his difficult stories made.
He’s indie to his core, but also just a great and nice guy who campaigned doggedly for what a film like Anora represents starting at 2024’s Cannes Film Festival. It helps that Anora was fun to watch and was just enough “about” something political so it didn’t feel like a total lark of a choice. And Mikey Madison had a real ingenue quality that voters could get behind as a real “star is born” style narrative. (The somewhat surprising victories in Best Actress for Madison and Emma Stone last year make for a welcome development in the category. These wins are rewards for actresses who are their film, not just standout performances in works that otherwise stand alone in their recognition.)
Ultimately, the Academy Awards are less a show about awarding merit and more of a collective settling on a story that the industry wants to project about itself. The show magnanimously rewarded cinema across all different scales, from big-budget spectacles like Dune: Part Two and Wicked to scrappy triumphs like The Brutalist and Flow. It was political enough to honor injustices past (I’m Still Here) and present (No Other Land) while mostly avoiding the embarrassing virtue signaling that a more full-throated embrace of Emilia Pérez would have represented.
I’m not entirely sure of how I think the Anora Best Picture win will age — it’s certainly a film I like a great deal, and even more upon rewatch. But it’s a very great example of where the film industry’s headspace resides leaving 2024. Anora is a small movie, and not even just when you put it side-by-side with its predecessor in the category. But that scale is fine with a ride-or-die indie stalwart like Sean Baker, and it’s fine with the business at large following a production cycle that started with dual union strikes and ended with destructive wildfires. A movie like Anora that is for movie lovers by movie lovers — and not necessarily for a wider audience — is about where this business and telecast are.
The show itself was surely one of the better ones we’ve experienced in many years thanks to the tone set by host Conan O’Brien. After two tough ceremonies of a smug Jimmy Kimmel acting above the movies and other hosts callously dismissing how few people saw the nominees, it was a balm to be in the presence of someone who can operate in a sardonic and sincere register with equal comfort. The jokes were tight and clever without overstaying their welcome, and the emcee’s general disposition of respect and regard for the institution of the Oscars made a difference.
I could quibble with a few things — namely, the James Bond music montage — but this Oscars was a delight to watch. While it lacked an ecstatic speech beyond Kieran Culkin’s typical barn-burning antics and didn’t have a showstopper in the vein of last year’s “I’m Just Ken,” the show was consistently engaging and entertaining. I’m not sure a relatively weaker crop of movies deserved a telecast this good, to be honest! But I won’t complain and just hope that the momentum continues forward — or that it’s just discovered and capitalized upon appropriately.
Congratulations to the Oscar winners I interviewed this year!
To paraphrase Lady Bird’s mom, awards are not life’s report card. For paid subscribers, here are 10 great movies from 2024 that got zero Oscar nominations!
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