Remember last year, when the big-budget, major studio blockbuster “Oppenheimer” dominated the Academy Awards after a few years of the top Oscars going to indie films like “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “CODA,” “Nomadland” and “Parasite?”
Well, 2024 must have been an anomaly, because the 97th Academy Awards on Sunday night were a giant case of Indie’s Revenge. A year after the $100 million “Oppenheimer” won seven awards and the $100 million-plus “Barbie” added an additional Oscar and dominated social media, a $6 million dramedy about a sex worker, “Anora,” won five awards and made Sean Baker, an indie director who’d never before been nominated for an Oscar, the only person besides Walt Disney to win four Academy Awards in one night.
And unlike Disney, who did it with one documentary feature and three different shorts in 1954, Baker got his grand slam with a single film and completed it with Best Picture.
And he had a simple message on the stage of the Dolby Theatre at the end of the night: “Long live independent film.”
A couple of weeks ago, a longtime Academy member said to me, “Do you really think the porn movie is going to win Best Picture?” The member wasn’t exactly disapproving – I’m pretty sure they liked “Anora” – but they were curious if the 97-year-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was really that bold and daring.
And now we have our answer. The Academy has spent the last eight years showing people that they’re not what they used to be – that films that were too frantic (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), too small (“CODA”), too genre (“The Shape of Water”) and too foreign (“Parasite”) could actually win Best Picture. On Sunday night, they added another movie to that roster of unlikely winners when their voters chose “Anora” as the best film of 2024.
But we shouldn’t really be surprised, because “Anora” also won the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, taking the top prize from a jury whose president was … Greta Gerwig, the director of “Barbie.”
The contrast between “Anora” and its main rival, Edward Berger’s “Conclave,” could not have been starker or more pointed. And neither could the fact that Baker’s raucous and sexually explicit story of a sex worker tangled up with the son of a Russian oligarch had beaten an impeccably made drama that seemed ideally positioned to be the kind of consensus choice that the Oscars’ ranked-choice voting system likes.
But “Anora” had won many of the precursor awards that are supposed to predict Oscar success, particularly the Directors Guild and Producers Guild Awards. Those two, which it won on the same night in early February, had made Baker’s film a serious Oscar favorite until the tail end of voting, when “Conclave” won big at the BAFTA Film Awards and then again at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
So while a “Conclave” upset was a very real possibility going into Oscar night, and would have been a likelihood not too long ago, this is a different Academy than it was less than a decade ago, before the #OscarsSoWhite controversy of 2016.
In its aftermath, the Academy embarked on a multi-year membership drive that increased the membership from about 6,000 to nearly 10,000 and became more diverse, more female and a lot more international. Since then, only two Best Picture awards have gone to major studios, with Universal winning twice, for “Green Book” and “Oppenheimer”; the others have gone to the indie imprint Searchlight twice, to A24 twice, to Apple once and now to Neon twice, with “Anora” joining “Parasite” as a Neon winner.
For a little more than an hour, the show kept up the suspense going: “Anora” won the original screenplay award about an hour into the show, and then “Conclave” countered with the Oscar for adapted screenplay to keep things even. But then the Best Film Editing category delivered a huge win for “Anora” and kept Sean Baker on track to tie Disney, with wins for Baker seemingly preordained for Best Director (a category in which Berger wasn’t even nominated) and Best Picture.
And when “Anora” star Mikey Madison scored a Best Actress upset over the sentimental favorite and presumed frontrunner, Demi Moore for “The Substance,” any last vestiges of suspense evaporated from the Dolby.
So now the Oscars have made what could be one of its boldest choices in years with “Anora.” Better luck next year, big-budget moviemakers.
Elsewhere on the show, the effect of the international voters who now make up 20% to 25% of the Academy was apparent early on, when a small Latvian animated feature, “Flow,” beat the presumed favorite, DreamWorks Animation’s “The Wild Robot,” extending that company’s losing streak to 23 years after it won the first animation Oscar for “Shrek” in 2002. (Chalk another one up for indies beating the big guys, this one in a category that doesn’t usually go this way.)
Many of the awards went to the pre-show favorites, with three of the acting races won by performers who were frontrunners for a reason: Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña in the supporting categories and Adrien Brody recovering from his SAG Awards loss to Timothée Chalamet to take the Best Actor prize. The last of the acting categories was Best Actress, where Madison scored the only acting upset of the night and showed just how much voters liked “Anora.”
Saldaña’s win was one sign that voters didn’t hold “Emilia Pérez” star Karla Sofía Gascón’s racist and Islamophobic tweets against Saldana or the “Emilia Pérez” songwriters, but the outcry did likely rob the film of what would have been an easy win in the Best International Feature Film category – though the fact that everybody who saw the film that did win, Walter Salles’ Brazilian drama “I’m Still Here” loved it gave it real momentum going into the final month of awards season.
“I’m Still Here” joined a pretty adventurous roster of Oscar winners: “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” “A Real Pain,” “The Substance,” “Flow,” “Emilia Perez” and a couple of nods to big-budget filmmaking in two awards each for “Wicked” and “Dune: Part Two.”
Maybe this is the new normal: Be it ever so indie, there’s no place like Oscar.
