Anora swept the Academy Awards this year, taking home five out of the six awards it was nominated for, including the illustrious Best Picture. A sweep like this did not come as a surprise considering Anora was the frontrunner and last year’s Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer, took home seven academy awards. What’s remarkable about this year though is that Sean Baker, Anora’s director, personally took home four of those five awards, (excluding Best Lead Actress which was awarded to first time nominee Mikey Madison) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Original Screenplay. This is because Anora is an independent film, Sean Baker being the sole director, editor, and writer of the project.
Baker has been making feature films since the early 2000s, films that are independent and gritty in nature, focusing heavily on real world struggles and people. His breakout 2015 hit Tangerine, was shot on an iPhone, yet was praised for its innovative techniques. This has led him to creating more films, expanding on these techniques, like 2017’s The Florida Project, and 2019’s Red Rocket, ultimately leading him to last year’s Anora, a film which many consider his most Sean Baker-esque film to date. Anora’s budget was only about six million dollars, highlighting the pure passion it took to overcome the relative financial shortcomings to create a film worthy of Best Picture.
In Baker’s Best Director speech, he sheds light on the importance of the cinema as a place of community and art, “We can laugh together, cry together, scream in fright together, perhaps sit in devastated silence together… it’s a communal experience you simply don’t get at home.” He then goes on to introduce and shed light on the threat facing these places of community, “Movie theaters, especially independently owned theaters are struggling, and it’s up to us to support them… in the pandemic we lost nearly 1,000 screens in the U.S. and we continue to lose them regularly.” He ends his speech, “If we don’t reverse this trend we’ll be losing a vital part of our culture… for all of us when we can, please watch movies in the theater and let’s keep the great tradition of the moviegoing experience alive and well.”
This is what independent filmmaking is all about, creating art and being able to see it on the big screen. Sean Baker is fighting for this, and this is why the Anora win represents much more. Coming off last year’s best picture winner Oppenheimer, with a budget of 100 million, Anora shows a heavy contrast with its low budget, showing the world that a small film, the passion project of one man, can make a vast impact.
Other nominees reflect this fact too. Brady Corbet’s three and a half-hour American epic, The Brutalist, was made with only 10 million dollars and took home Best Cinematography and Score (along with its star Adrien Brody being awarded his second Oscar for Lead Actor).
The budget and teams working on these films may be small, but that has little effect on how well the story can be told. A good director like Baker and Corbet will take what they have and use it as best they can, their passion becomes their tools to craft and mold a piece of art whose themes can transcend the screen. If we value film in the slightest, we should seek out these theater experiences and support these independent filmmakers in the ways we can.
This night seemed like a return to form for filmmaking. In the face of the fires and difficulties that the city of LA has gone through, the Academy has taken the step back to appreciate the filmmakers at the core of the industry. So go out and watch more movies, seek out stories for the sake of it, even if they don’t have all of the latest and greatest CGI and A-list stars. You may come across next year’s Best Picture.
