On the surface, last weekend’s two-day, three-show sweep for “Anora” appeared an unlikely surge for a film that had been losing momentum as an Oscar favorite.
In reality, though, what happened is probably less of a case of “Anora” rallying than it is a simple matter of Oscar watchers learning more about what voters have probably been thinking all along.
The lesson began on Friday evening at about 6:55 p.m. With one award left to go at the Critics Choice Awards, “Anora” seemed to be about fourth or fifth on the list of likely Best Picture winners. It had gone 0-for-5 at the Golden Globes in early January and had gone 0-for-6 with Critics Choice voters going into the final award of the night – and not only had “Wicked” director Jon M. Chu just won the Best Director award in an upset that gave one of the top rivals to “Anora” a seeming boost, it was up against the statistic that no movie had ever been named Best Picture at the CCA without winning in a single other category.
But then it won. And what I noticed in the room was that everybody was shocked, starting with “Anora” director Sean Baker and all the people at his table – but also that almost everyone was genuinely delighted, including a couple of directors of rival films who enthusiastically told me that if they had to lose, they were glad it was to “Anora.”
Earlier in the evening, I’d had a conversation with a veteran TV and radio reporter who thanked me for recommending Baker’s film when I’d run into him at the Golden Globes a few weeks earlier. He said it wasn’t the kind of movie he’d normally watch, and he resigned himself to it being a downer after watching about 15 or 20 minutes — but he stuck with it and was astonished by how enjoyable it was.
The Critics Choice voting had ended in early January, long before the presumed frontrunner “Emilia Pérez” had taken a hit because of star Karla Sofía Gascón’s racist and anti-Muslim tweets, so that show’s results came from votes cast when that film didn’t have a black cloud hanging over it. After the Friday night show and the conversations with the reporter and the directors, I started wondering if “Anora” might be more broadly appealing than I’d realized – maybe even broadly appealing enough to win at the Producers Guild, the only other voting body that uses the same ranked-choice voting system as the Oscars in the Best Picture category.
Even so, I and many others figured that the producers might go for a more mainstream film like “A Complete Unknown,” “Conclave” or “Wicked” – and I definitely didn’t think Baker stood much of a chance at the Directors Guild Awards, where the top prize seemed likely to go to Brady Corbet for “The Brutalist” or Jacques Audiard for “Emilia Pérez.” (Audiard could have been dinged by the fact that the final week of voting took place after the Gascón mess, but the first three weeks of voting had taken place before that.)
But Baker won DGA and “Anora” won PGA, which also voted too early to be affected by Gascón. And while it felt like a huge surge for that film, what it really meant is that while pundits and Oscar-watchers were assuming that “Emilia Pérez” was the frontrunner, voters were actually casting ballots for “Anora” – and that a raucous, nudity-filled, low-budget indie with an unknown cast was so much fun and also so moving that it warranted a spot alongside “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “CODA” as a movie that doesn’t feel like it should be an Oscar favorite, but is one.
Mind you, the Directors Guild-Producers Guild one-two punch isn’t infallible: Of the 26 films that have won both awards since the PGA began handing out its award in 1989, 20 have gone on to win the Best Picture Oscar, five have not and one year brought the strange situation where “Gravity” won the DGA, “Gravity” and “12 Years a Slave” tied at the PGA and “12 Years a Slave” won the Oscar.
“Apollo 13,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “La La Land” and “1917” were the films that won both DGA and PGA and lost at the Oscars. But it’s worth nothing that apart from perhaps “Apollo 13,” all of those films lost to films with smaller budgets, most recently when “La La Land” lost to “Moonlight” and “1917” to “Parasite.” For the most part, when a film that appears to be on a roll is brought down unexpectedly at the Oscars, it’s at the hands of a sneaky little indie – in other words, Oscar upsets don’t happen to movies like “Anora,” they happen at the hands of movies like “Anora.”
That puts Baker’s film in good shape, particularly since the Producers Guild would have been the best opportunity for “Wicked,” “A Complete Unknown,” “Conclave” or even “Emilia Pérez” to show they could build the kind of consensus necessary to win the Oscar. Instead, that trio of events showed that with Oscar voting beginning on Tuesday, maybe “Anora” has already built that consensus.
Of course, the last few years have taught us that the usual Oscar rules have a habit of crumbling in the face of the new, international Academy. The last week has taught us a lot of lessons about this Oscar season, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more lessons yet to be taught.