Remember last year, when the big budget, big studio blockbuster “Oppenheimer” dominated the Academy Awards after a few years of the best Oscars to indie films such as “Everything Everywhere at once”, “Coda”, “Nomadland” and “Parasite?”
Well, 2024 must have been an anomaly, since the 97th Academy Awards on Sunday evening was a gigantic 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 except Walt Disney To win four Academy Awards in one night.
And unlike Disney, who did it with a documentary function and three different shorts in 1954, Baker got its grand sludge with a single movie and completed it with the best image.
And he had a simple message on stage in the Dolby Theater at the end of the night: “Long live independent movie.”
A couple of weeks ago a long -lasting academy member told me: “Do you really think the porn movie will win the best picture?” The member did not reject exactly-I am pretty sure they liked the “Anora”-but they were curious about the 97-year-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was really so bold and wavy.
And now we have our answer. The academy has spent the last eight years showing people that they are not what they used to be – that movies that were too hectic (“everything everywhere at once”), too small (“coda”), for genre (“The Shape of Water”) and too strange (“parasite”) could actually win the best picture. On Sunday evening, they added another movie to that list of unlikely winners when their voters chose “Anora” as the best movie 2024.
But we shouldn’t really be surprised, because “Anora” also won the Palme d’Or at the Film Festival 2024 Cannes and took the top prize from a jury whose president was … Greta Gerwig, director of “Barbie.”
The contrast between “Anora” and its main rival, Edward Berger’s “Conclave”, could not have been stronger or more pointed. And the fact also could not that Baker’s rough and sexually explicit story about a sex worker tangled 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 Oscar’s ranked choice of voting systems like.
But “Anora” had won many of the predecessors to predict Oscar success, especially Director Guild and Producer’s Guild Awards. These two, as it won the same night in early February, had made Baker’s film a serious Oscar favorite until the tail at the 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 opportunity to go into the Oscar night and would have been a probability not so long ago, this is a different academy than it was less than a decade ago, before the #oscarsowhite accounts in 2016.
In the aftermath, the academy began a multi -year member drive that increased membership from about 6,000 to almost 10,000 and became more versatile, more female and much more international. Since then, only two best Picture Awards have gone to big studios, with Universal Winning twice, for “Green Book” and “Oppenheimer”; The others have gone to Indie Imprint Searchlight twice, to the A24 twice, to Apple once and now to neon twice, with “Anora” who joined “Parasite” as a neon winner.
For just over an hour, the show continued the excitement: “Anora” won the original script award about an hour into the show and then “Conclave” countered Oscar for custom script to keep things even. But then the best film editing category delivered a huge victory for “Anora” and held Sean Baker on the right track to bind Disney, with victories for Baker who seemed to be predetermined for best director (a category where Berger was not even nominated) and best picture.
And when “Anora” star Mikey Madison made a best actress upset at the sentimental favorite and adopted Frontrunner, Demi Moore for “The Substance”, all last remains of excitement were evaporated from Dolby.
So now Oscars has done what could be one of its coolest choices in several years with “Anora.” Better luck next year, big budget monakies.
Elsewhere on the show was the effect of the international voters, which now make up 20% to 25% of the academy early, when a small Latvian animated function, “Flow”, beat the adopted favorite, Dreamworks -Animation’s “The Wild Robot”, which extended that company’s losing line “in 23 years after it won the first animation for the ococar for the first comment not so.)
Many of the awards went to the favorites before the show, with three of the actors who won by artists who were Frontrunners for a reason: Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña in the support categories and Adrien Brody recovered from his Sag Awards loss to Timothée Chalamet to take the best actor. The last of the actress categories was the best actress, where Madison made the only actor of the night and showed how much voters liked “Anora.”
Saldaña’s win was a sign that the voters did not hold “Emilia Pérez” star Karla Sofía Gascón’s racist and Islamophobic tweets against balances or “Emilia Pérez” writers, but The Princry probably robbed the movie about what would have been a simple win in the best international movie Wal, Wal, Wal, Wal, Wal’s’ The Brazilian drama “I’m still here” loved it gave it real speed on the last month of the award.
“I’m still here” joined a rather adventurous list of Oscar winners: “Anora”, “The Brutalist”, “A Real Pain”, “The Substance”, “Flow”, “Emilia Perez” and a couple of nods for large budget film production in two awards each for “wicked” and “dune.
Maybe this is the new normal: whether ever so indie, there is no place like Oscar.
