“We may all need to update our mental model of what a Best Picture winner looks like,” said Nate Jones in NYMag.com. When Anora added the top prize to its already impressive haul at the close of this year’s Oscars ceremony, it made Oppenheimer, last year’s winner, look like a big-budget outlier in an otherwise growing run of scrappy art house hits—Moonlight, Parasite, etc.—that have emerged as Academy favorites.
Sean Baker’s low-budget tragicomedy about a stripper who elopes with the hard-partying young son of a Russian oligarch emerged victorious after an up-and-down awards season because, given the voting rules, “the top prize typically goes to the most likable contender.” Still, “the primary reason Anora won is because this is not the same Oscars as it was 10 years ago,” when the #Oscars SoWhite campaign forced the Academy to bring in new members. Those newbies apparently favor bold films.
Baker had a fairy-tale night, joining Walt Disney as the only other person to ever win four Oscars in one year, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. “But even Disney didn’t pull off Baker’s feat: earning four Oscars on one night for the same movie”—in this case for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing. Both men, fittingly, specialize in retelling fairy tales, though in Baker’s films, “the American dream is a fairy tale, a beautiful story we repeat that for many goes sour.” Anora’s title character, played by surprise Best Actress winner Mikey Madison, thinks she has hit the jackpot when she weds a wealthy Russian man-child. But she’s wrong, which is why, “more than any other film in many years,” Anora “speaks directly to how it feels to be alive right now,” said Will Leitch in The Washington Post. As a privileged few “rampage through the world,” ignoring the mess they’re making, “the rest of us desperately try to attend to their needs and keep our heads above water.”
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Anora wasn’t the night’s only winner, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Adrien Brody (The Brutalist), Zoe Saldaña (Emilia Pérez), and Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain) all delivered memorable speeches when they were handed their acting awards. Meanwhile, Conan O’Brien “absolutely rocked his debut as a host,” and “the telecast itself was a brisk and elegantly executed piece of media stagecraft.” But those newer, younger, more international voters truly have changed what the Oscars are about. They admire artistic purity above crowd-pleasing, and “that, for better or worse, is what now rules at the Oscars.”
