'Anora' Won Best Picture and What It Says About This Year and Last

It did prove "The Substance" right, if anything

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Well, the Oscars have officially come and gone and we can say goodbye to last year’s films and start trying to figure out what’s going to win from this year. (I think the first wave of Oscar pundit predictions might have already dropped?) If you were in our subscriber chat last night — and thank you to everyone who came — then you experienced what I called a pretty basic award show. No real surprised, nothing shocking, and continued fervor about the stars the In Memoriam segment forgot to include. In the end, Sean Baker’s Anora won five of the six categories it was nominated for, and Yura Borisov should have won don’t tell me otherwise.

I saw varying opinions last night into this morning focused on two key themes: surprise that it won Best Picture and pointing out the bitter irony of actress Mikey Madison taking Best Actress over favorite, and frontrunner, Demi Moore. Hollywood has never been particularly good at practicing what they preach. Hell, it’s why movies like CODA win Best Picture and yet disabled representation is still terrible. So, in the end, it wasn’t surprising that a young, beautiful ingenue won over the older, seasoned actress. If anything, would love to hear from some of those anonymous Oscar voters to see if they noticed as well.

But what I’m more fascinated by is how Anora, a $6 million film put out by Neon, steamrolled through much of awards season and became our ultimate Best Picture winner. Film is a dialectic. The films influence culture and the culture influences the films. You can’t say Anora won in a vacuum and that it says nothing about where we are, right this second. It points out a few things to me starting with how we define popular vs. prestige.

We’ve seen the stats about low Oscar viewership and the Academy’s continued pursuit to balance Best Picture nominees between popular blockbusters and more adult “artistic” fare.” And while Wicked seemed to fill that niche it was Anora that truly seemed to bridge the divide. If you’ve seen Anora in a theater it’s a true crowdpleaser. It’s splashy, neon-soaked posters and pop-tinged trailers didn’t sell it as a serious awards movie but a Pretty Woman-esque screwball comedy turned on its ear. While Baker hearkens back to Italian neorealists when talking about his influences, he understands how to balance entertainment with a social message in a way that never feels like taking medicine or watch a “Movie.” It’s the true balance between art and fun.

And that’s really I feel what people were looking for: trying to make sense of the chaos around us by celebrating a film that made us feel as much fun as possible, before giving us that knife twist of an ending. There was a moment in the Oscars broadcast last night where host Conan O’Brien said, “You know, Anora's having a good night. Yeah... Two wins already. I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian." The audience didn’t know whether they were supposed to laugh or not which feels like something most people are doing all over the world. Yet, O’Brien’s point is correct, and I think that’s another element people are responding to.

Films, no matter what you want to say, are inherently political. They point to the politics of our time, no matter how small. Anora, amongst the Mikey Madison stripteases and screaming, is the story of a working stiff trying to make ends meet and falling into the con of a fairy tale. Ani, as much as she tries to resist Vanya and call him out for his joking, truly wants to believe this is the moment everyone waits for: the idea of a windfall hitting you in a way that will take you our of your circumstances and change your life for the better, immediately and permanently. Whether it’s hitting the lottery or meeting a Russian billionaire, we all dream of a magical fix that is going to make us feel financially and socially secure for the rest of our lives.

In the end, Ani is the one left broken, humiliated and right back where she started. And what’s sadder is she tried so hard to be realistic. As a millennial, I’ll tell you there isn’t really a time I’ve felt the economic security and prosperity most people mythologizing the ‘90s for. There’s an excellent video review by Todd in the Shadows of, weirdly enough, Pitbull and Ne-Yo’s 2014 song “Time of My Life” that sums it up as a song about the struggles of life being omnipresent, understanding that, and just trying to find the ability to have fun in spite of it. That’s what I think of when I look at Anora. Life is hard, we know this, we know there are people who would seek to take advantage of us under the guise of “solving” our problems, and trying to find a way to find fun knowing that the game is rigged.

People at the Oscars might not have known whether to laugh at Conan’s Russian joke, but I think giving the Best Picture award to Anora was that last laugh.