Why Anora Will Win Best Picture
Tomorrow's the day! No less than 10 films are ramping up their campaigns in a last-minute push for the top prize of them all, the Oscar for Best Picture. This also appears to be a far more competitive race than in years past, which has often spat out at best two-horse races (like The Power of the Dog vs. CODA in 2022, or 1917 vs. Parasite in 2020), but more often a runaway coronation (as we've had in the last two years, with Oppenheimer and Everything Everywhere All At Once).
No, this one genuinely feels wide open in large part because of how many new names are up for the big awards. For the first time in history, the 5 Best Director nominees at these Oscars are all first-time nominees. Only 1 out of the 10 combined Best Actor and Best Actress nominees has ever won an Oscar, and only 4 of them have even been nominated before. But it's not just the absence of bona fide star power helming the nominated movies; it's the fact that there isn't a traditional frontrunner, as a small handful of films have split honors across the awards circuit thus far.
Those facts, as well as the Oscars' less predictable preferential voting system means that no nominee can truly be counted out of the race. Spotlight's and Moonlight's back-to-back upsets in 2016 and 2017, Parasite's stunner in 2020, and CODA's late surge in 2022 all taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 2nd.
I promise the plan all along was to do these in reverse alphabetical order, and it just so happens that the way it turned out, we've finished with the three biggest favorites to win this award. And now we arrive at the final nominee, and the one that has pulled into the lead in the betting sweepstakes, Sean Baker’s Anora.
Baker, in his relatively limited directorial career, has carved out a reputation for being an innovative filmmaker who is among the best storytellers for underrepresented populations, such as sex workers. No surprise, then, that his first big Oscar sensation is a layered, multifaceted Rom-Com-Dram centering around a sex worker in a predominantly immigrant community. The titular Anora, played by ingenue Mikey Madison, is a young stripper in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, who meets and connects with one particular client, the younger son of a Russian oligarch. An oddly heartwarming, underdog love story ensues, but not without several twists that keep the audience guessing as to what is coming next.
Anora is far from traditional Oscar bait, and fittingly, its journey to Best Picture favorite has not been a traditional one. If one were to track its odds, they would probably pictorially represent somewhat of a reverse bell curve. The movie’s uniformly positive reviews built hype straight out of the gates, hype that only increased exponentially as it took him the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival (eventually becoming the third consecutive winner from this festival to land a Best Picture nomination, following Triangle of Sadness and Anatomy of a Fall). However, when awards season started in earnest, it got off to an inglorious start, going 0 for 5 at the Golden Globes. It languished largely winless in the ensuing weeks of lesser-known awards shows, and as other viable candidates emerged, the movie ran into its first real controversy regarding the lack of intimacy coordinators used in a very sex-heavy film. It was starting to feel like perhaps the window had simply closed for Anora when, in one wild weekend in February, it took top honors at the Critics’ Choice Awards, Directors’ Guild and Producers’ Guild in three consecutive nights. The sound you heard across the country in that first February weekend were awards show prognosticators’ necks cracking from the whiplash, as Baker’s film suddenly skyrocketed to the top of the pile to claim “favorite” status. The first two wins were head-turning own their own merit, but the Producers’ Guild (PGA) in particular is notorious for being the most directly predictive of the Oscar for Best Picture; that specific Academy Award is given to the producers of the film, after all. Only 5 times in the 21st Century has the winner at the PGAs not gone on to take home Best Picture, and while, yes, 3 of those 5 instances came within the last decade, each one was also deemed one of the biggest Oscar upsets we had seen in a long time (Spotlight over The Big Short, Moonlight over La La Land, Parasite over 1917).
That said, just as suddenly as it became the runaway favorite, it lost its comfortable status— the trophy was being put on ice too soon. In the last two weekends leading up to this one, it was beaten out for Best Film/Best Ensemble at the BAFTAs and then the SAG Awards, and both times by the same competitor: Conclave. The good news is, even if the Academy Awards race actually played out like a straight-line race in which losing momentum toward the finish line was the end-all— and it doesn’t, and isn’t —Anora has a couple aces up its sleeve. Its director and writer Sean Baker is the currentfavorite to win his first-ever Best Director Oscar, which would make him the 3rd consecutive director— and 4th in the last 5 years —to double up with a Best Picture win, should he get one. And how many times have I discussed in this series the power of an attention-getting, award-winning star turn from a nominee’s lead? Mikey Madison provides just that in Anora, giving perhaps the buzziest lead performance of the year this side of Chalamet; it’s no surprise she’s won so often on the circuit already, and is the current co-favorite for Best Actress in a hotly contested race. She’s also the new face on the block in this category this year: a win for her in Best Actress would almost certainly signify a level of acceptance of her film that’s enough to give it the title.
None of the Best Picture winners in the 2020s, beginning with Parasite and continuing up through Oppenheimer last year, have remotely resembled each other, and if Anora is to win, that trend would continue. But it’s not just novelty driving the groundswell of support: there’s something in this seemingly simple movie for everyone: its brazen nudity and sexuality is perhaps sexy but more so subversive. The bulk of its riotous middle section is a 'heist comedy.’ But, at the end and at its core, it’s a deeply sad, deeply American class commentary story.
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