The dazzling underdog with amazing legs: how Anora swept the Oscars

The Guardian

03-03-2025

Anora is officially film of the year, crowned supreme at the Oscars, just as it was at Cannes when it was anointed with the Palme d'Or last May. That's a long path to glory, and a fairly untrodden one. Parasite made it five years ago; the previous film to do so was Marty in 1955. (In fact, Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend achieved a similar feat 10 years before that, but then the top prize at Cannes was the Grand Prix, and it was shared.)
Anyway: a small number. Acquired by Neon for the US before Cannes, Anora opened there last October in an effective rollout. Half of its earnings were made stateside, with the rest predominantly in Europe, and France – which takes Cannes seriously – proving the major market. It has also done brisk trade in Russia ($3m so far), which can't be said for a lot of the other nominees, and says something interesting about the accuracy and flattery of film-maker Sean Baker's take on Little Odessa in New York, where Anora is set.
So far, globally, it's on about six times its $6m budget and, despite being widely available on streaming, will doubtless enjoy a lucrative theatrical rerelease.
For a long time, though, the film was not assumed to be a shoo-in for major silverware. From Hollywood, the Palme indicates uber arty, and Baker – whose previous films include the trans sex worker iPhone Christmas eve caper Tangerine, and child prankster comedy The Florida Project – is a faintly outre figure for the academy to entirely embrace (in our interview, he admits to still taking drugs).
But as the fates of its rivals ebbed and flowed, and the foundations of The Brutalist's dominance appeared a bit more crumbly, so Anora emerged as the favourite – particularly after scooping up three guild awards (other than the one voted for by actors). No film has taken the trio and then gone on to miss out on the main prize since Brokeback Mountain, in 2006, which lost to Paul Haggis's Crash.
The Independent Spirit awards were always going to lap it up, but it also proved, more unexpectedly, Baftas catnip, taking the casting prize, as well as best actress for Mikey Madison. After all that, the Hollywood Reporter gave it a 52% chance of winning, effectively meaning no white smoke for The Brutalist and poor old Conclave puffing in the shadows.
It's perhaps Parasite, also distributed by Neon, which provides the clearest explanation for how Anora won. The distributor ran a similar playbook for both films: that early Cannes debut that allowed critical buzz to slowly build across the summer, followed by a slow rollout that built audience word of mouth across the autumn. Both films had a breathless, genre-skipping style that audiences thrilled to, and both films felt firmly rooted in the present in best picture fields that otherwise seemed preoccupied with the past. (Parasite's biggest rival, after all, was the rather plodding first world war drama 1917.)
Still, also like Parasite, there was a dollop of good fortune atop the careful planning: Anora didn't assume frontrunner status until it was too late for a genuine backlash to build. In Anora's case, the film managed to stay largely clean – bar a fleeting hoo-ha around the lack of intimacy coordinators on set – while other films had to reckon with controversies around AI (The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez) and stars' disastrous past tweets (again, Emilia Pérez).
But maybe we're overthinking things: perhaps the answer was more simple, and Anora was the film enjoyed by the biggest number of that strange, wide cross-section of Academy members – from traditionalists to international-facing arthouse lovers. After all, it regularly came near the top of voters' anonymous ballots, in contrast to the forbidding, monolithic The Brutalist, or Conclave with its divisive twist ending. Anora might have just been the film, of those best picture nominees, that audience members came out of the cinema most excited about.
That feels fitting: Baker was at pains to underscore the importance of the communal cinematic experience in his (many) awards-season speeches, almost suggesting that a vote for Anora was a vote for the big screen itself, at a time when that tradition was being lost. (A similar trick was tried by The Brutalist, though it was somewhat undermined by its director, Brady Corbet, using his biggest platform – his Golden Globe speech – to drone on about the decidedly insider issue of 'final cut tie-break' instead.) With Anora Baker built a powerful movement, of cinema-lovers backing the underdog – and the medium itself.
Follow your heart, went the film's savvy tagline. It seemed that the Academy did just that.
Read more about the 2025 Oscars:
Anora takes home best picture Oscar
Adrien Brody and Mikey Madison win best acting prizes
Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña win supporting awards
Anora's Sean Baker wins for directing, editing and screenplay