When Quentin Tarantino strode onstage last night at the Academy Awards ceremony to hand out best director, it was an indicator of two things. The first was that last year’s winner in the category, Christopher Nolan, was unavailable. Nolan is currently in Marrakech working on his star-studded, carte blanche adaptation of The Odyssey, an almost self-parodically grand project made possible by the world-beating success of Oppenheimer, and whose production also potentially explained the absence of A-listers like Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Charlize Theron, Anne Hathaway, and Zendaya from the ceremony. (The last surely texted her bestie Timothée Chalamet in the wee hours of the morning, GMT, to commiserate over his loss to Adrien Brody for The Brutalist. Chalamet may or may not have been robbed for his effort-intensive impersonation of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, but his speech would have been considerably less lugubriously self-aggrandizing than Brody’s remarks, which danced clumsily around the actor’s quasi-cancellation, before landing on a call for unity in trying times that could have been generated by ChatGPT.)
The second was that Sean Baker was going to win best director for Anora. There is precedent for the Academy tipping its hand in this particular category via its choice of presenter: In 2007, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola teamed up to bestow a long-delayed Oscar on their pal Martin Scorsese—a moment no less great for being so obviously stage-managed. Tarantino and Baker don’t have the same kind of personal history, but over the course of this awards season, Baker has assumed Tarantino’s mantle of loud and proud public advocacy on behalf of the theatrical moviegoing experience. “We can laugh together, cry together, scream together, perhaps sit in devastated silence together,” said the filmmaker during his acceptance speech, to whoops of applause. “Movie theaters, especially independently owned movie theaters, are struggling, and it’s up to us to support them.” As Baker spoke, the camera caught Tarantino, himself the proprietor of an independent cinema in Los Angeles, smiling approvingly.
It was a very good night for Baker, who, by taking home best director as well as citations for best original screenplay, best editing, and best picture (shared with several other producers, including his wife, Samantha Quan), became only the second person in history to win four Oscars in a single evening. His predecessor: Walt Disney, whose name was hilariously evoked in Anora’s Oscar campaign by a pullquote blurb claiming that the film—about a Brighton Beach sex worker who’s drawn into a sham marriage with a callow and well-monied young client—“made Pretty Woman look like a Disney movie,” when in fact Pretty Woman was, literally, a Disney movie. (At the end of Baker’s previous movie, The Florida Project, the characters try to flee to Walt Disney World—a fantasy moment played for pathos.)
Reading the tea leaves of Anora’s mini-sweep—which also extended to its star Mikey Madison, who upset putative front-runner Demi Moore in the best actress race—means on the one hand discarding the film’s polarizing response in online circles (including thoughtful and skeptical assessments of Baker’s depiction of sex work) and on the other downplaying its relatively modest domestic box office take of $40 million (and counting). Oppenheimer, which made more than a billion dollars, was the highest-grossing best picture winner of all time. The only winners since 1990 to make less money than Anora were Nomadland and CODA, the latter of which had only played in theaters for one week in order to qualify for the awards in the first place; if there’s a trend to be spotted over the last 10 years, it’s that awards for big-studio productions like Oppenheimer have become the exception rather than the rule.
Artistically speaking, Anora easily clears Nomadland and CODA, and also the vast majority of twenty-first-century winners thus far. It’s a fleet, skillful, and entertainingly well-staged screwball comedy blessed with a vivid sense of place and riven with the kind of tension between form and content that makes it, at a minimum, worth seeing. Baker is very good at what he does, even if the precise nature of that achievement, and of the filmmaker’s recursive, almost pathological, immersion in a particular milieu of transactional sexuality, is up for debate. But for all its glancing evocations of class struggle and economic exploitation and bristling, R-rated explicitness—including a near-record 479 instances of the f-word, as duly inventoried by Conan O’Brien during his monologue—Anora hasn’t been designed as any sort of load-bearing cultural statement. It’s long but slight. Its pleasures are immediate and evaporate nearly as quickly.
That may not be the ideal descriptor for a best picture winner. It’s pretty decent for an Oscars show, however, and despite some genuinely bizarre choices—like staging an extended, weirdly eulogistic song-and-dance for the James Bond franchise, in honor of producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, and scoring the annual In Memoriam segment like a scene from The First Omen—the broadcast went down easily enough. The opening musical number, with Wicked witches Ariana Grande and Cynthia Eviro covering “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Home,” respectively, before converging on “Defying Gravity,” was more conceptually sound as a tribute to The Wizard of Oz than to post-wildfire Los Angeles. (The accompanying I Love L.A. montage included clips from the late David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, which makes Anora, and everything else, look like a Disney movie.) It was, however, effective on its own button-pushy, showbiz-tearjerker terms, and as a way of getting the most populist best picture also-ran some airtime—the same strategy behind having O’Brien throw, not once but twice, to a puppet-size version of Dune: Part Two’s sandworm. “When you spend that much money on something,” the host deadpanned, “you’re going to use it twice.”
O’Brien is a canonically funny guy with nothing to prove, and he hosted like it. His performance existed in the sweet spot between puppyish ingratiation in the Billy Crystal mode and sneering, above-it-all indifference à la Seth MacFarlane. He parried entertainingly with a tracksuited Adam Sandler in the audience (Sandler having accrued a remarkable amount of goofball gravitas in the decades between Billy Madison and Uncut Gems), and consolidated the precious time-wasting instincts he cultivated on his talk shows into a production number about the perils of wasting time (the first appearance of the sandworm, as well as a cameo by a dancing Deadpool—thankfully not revealed to actually be Ryan Reynolds, who should be issued a restraining order by awards shows). O’Brien talked about movies like he actually enjoyed watching them, enlisting Scorsese—who has even more gravitas than Adam Sandler—to put across an SNL-style fake ad for a company called “Cinemastreams,” a satirical proof of concept for the revolutionary structures known as movie theaters, underwritten, as per the fine print, by “the Sackler Family and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Beyond using Anora to prod Donald Trump’s deference to Vladimir Putin (“I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian”), O’Brien eschewed politics (which is arguably preferable than inserting them in an attempt to curry favor). The obligatorily sober references to local devastation were carefully handled, with members of L.A. Fire Department enlisted to deliver the best zingers (“All of of our hearts go out to those who have lost their homes, and I’m talking about the producers of Joker 2.”)
Crucially, O’Brien and his writers sold the idea, tied to the impact of the fires on the larger Hollywood community, that this year’s show would pay respect to the actual craft of filmmaking. Which it did, if inconsistently and eccentrically, by giving certain below-the-line categories extended showcases, like having the nominees for best costume design and best cinematography feted individually by cast members from their productions. (The big winners in the technical category were Wicked, Dune: Part Two, and The Brutalist, all striking, epically scaled movies, two of which each cost exponentially more than the third.) At the same time, the stilted personal encomiums in the supporting acting categories from presenters Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Robert Downey Jr. to the nominees were poor substitutes for clips of the performances themselves, while asking viewers to scan a barcode to hear the best original song nominees, rather than having them performed live, was flat-out disrespectful. Emilia Pérez’s composer, Camille, did try to get the audience to sing along to the winning entry, “El Mal,” during her acceptance speech, to no real avail; as an earworm, it’s not exactly “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” or even “Defying Gravity.”
It turned out that the Emilia Pérez backlash was real, to the point that the various montages seemed designed to omit best actress nominee Karla Sofîia Gascón as much as possible (“There’s not a lot of Emilia Pérez in these clips,” observed my wife, Tanya). It didn’t stop “El Mal” from beating out Dianne Warren’s “The Journey,” which represented the songwriter’s sixteenth failed Oscar bid in a row (her first was for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” from 1987’s Mannequin, which, as earworms go, is closer to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”) And it didn’t prevent Zoe Saldana’s best supporting actress victory for her showy role as a cartel lawyer in the throes of a crisis of conscience—a performance that, like nearly everything else in Emilia Perez, is spirited and incoherent. But despite its record-tying 13 nominations overall, Jacques Audiard’s film lost the best international feature film Oscar to Walter Salles’s finely turned political drama I’m Still Here—a good result.
Both Saldana and Salles gave earnest, impassioned speeches referencing the dangers of authoritarianism, but the most charged moment was the presentation of best documentary feature to No Other Land, whose co-directors, Basel Adra (a Palestinian journalist and activist) and Yuval Abraham (an Israeli journalist), displayed the same united front onstage as they did on-screen in a film structured around images of violently razed Palestinian homes. “We call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people,” said Adra. The moment would have been even more dramatic if Gal Gadot, who was originally supposed to present best documentary, had not been moved over to best special effects; the absence of cutaways to the audience during Adra and Abraham’s remarks was conspicuous in and of itself.
One of the enduring justifications—or, if you like, apologias—for the Oscars is that they help to draw attention to worthy movies. If, as O’Brien suggested, there were a billion people (give or take) watching last night—or at least they were until the Hulu feed cut out, right before the final awards—it’d probably make good business sense for some American (or Canadian) distributor to pick up No Other Land and put it in theaters. To paraphrase Baker’s observations about the sanctity of communal viewing, the sold-out screening I attended of the film in Toronto had its share of devastated silences, and they spoke volumes.
