Flasz On Film

When Sean Baker’s Anora was announced as this year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, I wasn’t necessarily all that surprised because the most reliable predictors of Oscar success such as the PGA, DGA and WGA awards all pointed to this possibility. I was honestly relieved because at least in my estimation, it was the best movie of the year and if it hadn’t been for its sweep during the awards season, it would eventually end up forgotten and tossed to the kerb of the zeitgeist, overshadowed by flashier productions with more familiar cultural footprint. 

However, Baker’s film did in fact win and it is worth stopping for a minute to think about what this victory might say about the world around us. First and foremost, it is now well-documented that Anora’s win remains an interesting anomaly because it is only the fourth time in history that a Palme d’Or winning movie went on to secure the top prize at the Academy Awards. The other three were Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (although its victory predates the concept of the “Palme d’Or” and what it won was the Grand Prix of the Cannes Festival), Marty by Delbert Mann and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Whether the Cannes Festival can be called an Oscar incubator, or a reliable predictor remains to be seen—one swallow does not summer make—but it potentially illustrates that Academy voters have recently become more inclined to look past the more predictable studio-backed productions or the more thematically and aesthetically familiar bait.  

Why I personally think Anora taking home its big wins last Sunday, which included Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Screenplay and Editing, is something to think and talk about extends beyond this film’s long road to victory that commenced on the screens of the 2024 Cannes Festival. Even considering the fact that in the last three decades it has more expected for independently backed productions to triumph over the big spectacles bankrolled by either of the big dogs, it is still quite rare for truly independent movies to build enough momentum and sustain enough cultural presence for Academy voters to lend them their crucial support. In fact, Anora is only one of four movies made on a budget below ten million dollars to win the Best Picture Oscar in the last thirty years together with Moonlight, Nomadland and Crash, and with CODA coming in with its round ten-million-dollar budget courtesy of Apple Studios and Pathé.  

This is nothing to sniff at because—forgetting for a second that a few million dollars is still objectively a life-changingly big pile of money—at the time when big studios can easily commit nine-digit sums to market and push their movies (Oppenheimer) it’s increasingly difficult for independent productions to gain sufficient traction without the backing of someone with deep pockets. The matter becomes even more complex when the movie in question, while already financially constrained from going to war with movies like Wicked and its Universal purse, or Emilia Pérez and its Netflix credit line, can be seen as thematically “spicy” by your typical Academy voter. Now, the Academy has undergone many changes in recent years and increased diversity of its membership, which is a polite way of saying that it has diluted the strength of its octogenarian straight white male contingent, but it remains a body that on the whole favors the more crowd-pleasing, familiar and inoffensive filmmaking. In the year when Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman was vying for top awards, it lost to the more predictable schmaltzy Green Book. Last year when Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer obliterated its competition, movies like American Fiction, The Holdovers, Past Lives and The Zone of Interest would have made for more culturally relevant and important choices, but at least some of them carried a risk of the film industry venturing a little bit into the sphere of political conversation; which is something they occasionally do, but infrequently enough and mostly through backing otherwise inoffensive productions.  

This is probably how Conclave—a veritable catnip for older Academy voters who’d be likely to back a movie that looks as though it had something important to say but did so in a manner so saccharine and bland that it never risked offending or upsetting anyone who sat down to watch it—managed to build its last-minute rally with its BAFTA and SAG wins. After all, it is inherently easier to get behind a movie you can watch with your whole family and then engage in a conversation that looks culturally relevant and makes you look progressive and cool. Meanwhile, Anora begins with full frontal nudity and remains soaked in such raw energy and controversial subject matter that it’s just difficult to recommend it to anyone without seriously risking a hit to your social stature. You recommend Anora to a colleague at work, and you may find yourself summoned to an HR hearing because to this day many topics surrounding sex work and the ideas of explicit nudity depicted on the screen remain for the most part taboo in the mainstream of polite society.  

Which is why Anora needed its Awards clout because now it might get seen and talked about for long enough that your aunt and uncle might work past the explicit stuff and see that this “Pretty Woman for Gen-Zers” is stunningly relevant to the here and now. With America slipping into a full-blown out-and-out oligarchy run from the sidelines by anarcho-capitalists like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg under the aegis of MAGA 2.0, what Sean Baker’s story deals with reflects eerily the reality of what it’s like to live in a society where the gap between the rich and the poor has grown to become an impassable chasm. Of all the movies last year that openly commented on the culture of the time and had something provocative to say about it, Anora did so with the most panache and flair. While perennially entertaining and incredibly funny, Baker’s signature eye for the underdog and a penchant for pointing his camera at the fringes of society matters because what we know as the Western civilization underpinned by its strong middle class is a thing of the past. In Baker’s movie, there are no people who are just OK or who have jobs, families and lives to live. There are those who live like kings on the back of their kleptocratic gains or high-stakes crypto gambling disguised as financial savvy, and the Untermensch who fight for scraps falling off their plates, hoping for a lucky break while selling their souls and bodies to survive the night. Rewarding a movie like that at a time when Trump is busy dismantling the World Order and Musk’s DOGE preps the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich was a bold move, even if the public at large remains largely unaware of the significance of this act.  

But it did in fact take place and now we can only hope that dots will end up connecting in people’s minds and they will see Anora not only as an underdog with long legs finishing a marathon run that started in Cannes, but also as a bona fide piece of cultural commentary that is as relevant as it is stinging. Problem is that in contrast to movies like Parasite, Sean Baker’s movie never succeeded in generating a cultural moment around its stunning victory. There is no Baker hive on social media to propel this movie towards timelessness. And I wonder if this is perhaps because—frightening as it may be to someone like me for whom movies remain a great passion—cinema has shifted away from the epicentre of the cultural conversation. In contrast to the 70s, 80s, and 90s when movies were where the culture was, the center of gravity is now elsewhere. Whether the cultural conversation has reliably shifted towards serialized entertainment (because I think it would be inappropriate to call it TV), or rather towards short-form content blitzing through timespace as we doomscroll while waiting for buses to turn up, I do not know yet. It might be too early to tell. 

However, it may already be a good time to wonder if movies—however relevant they may be to us who cherish them—hold the same cultural sway as they used to in the past. Therefore, as much as I rejoiced at Anora’s big day, it’s already in the past and everyone seems to have moved on. In the world of short attention spans, limbic hijacking and dopaminergic engineering in content creation, a movie like Anora is unlikely to leave a dent on the cultural consciousness. Not because it’s explicit, impenetrable or controversial. It might rather be because movies are no longer the focal point of our culture. But the scarier thought I am now struggling with is that I am not sure if cinema deserves to remain as the cultural centerpiece.