Oscars 2025: Anora's Big Night

Another Awards Season is in the books! If you’ve been keeping up with the race, there were a few key categories that could have gone several ways heading into Sunday night’s show. Now that the dust has settled, who came away with big wins? Were they deserving? How did Conan O’Brien do in his first hosting gig?

Conan and the Broadcast. Feel free to invite Conan back to host anytime – I thought he did great! His opening monologue, following an L.A.-centric montage and a Wicked/Wizard of Oz medley, struck the perfect balance between light political jabs, heavier anti-Amazon jabs, roasting and toasting the nominees in equal measure. Fortunately, he refrained from the recent “no one has heard of these movies” stuff that was a fixture of COVID-era awards shows, and the presence of Wicked and Dune: Part Two in the Best Picture lineup would have invalidated that anyway. This monologue did mean that 30 minutes passed before any awards started, and the ceremony ran well over its advertised 3.5-hour runtime, in contrast to last year's which ran UNDER. I can think of a few likely culprits:

• Taking more time on the crafts categories, particularly Costume Design and Cinematography, to individually toast each nominee – this is a GOOD thing

• A bizarre, bizarrely long “Tribute to Bond”, not on any anniversary, but only days after the long-time stewards of the franchise sold the rights to Amazon. Perhaps this was a subtle “In Memoriam” to the property as we knew it for the last 63 years, but either way it stalled what had been a mostly crisp ceremony. The tribute to Quincy Jones featuring one song from The Wiz was a much tighter, yet similar effort

• An awful lot of advertisements for Hulu, but hey, gotta make that money

Before I get too deep into any thoughts on the big-ticket winner(s), a few highlights from the broadcast that are worth a YouTube watch:

• Wicked’s historic win for Costume Design

• Ben Stiller presenting Production Design on a “faulty” stage

• Conan inviting LAFD members and First Responders to perform a couple of jokes

• No Other Land’s politically urgent win and speech

• Anything involving John Lithgow, really

• Sean Baker embracing representing indie filmmaking and theatrical distribution

• The International winners for Animated Feature, Animated Short, and International Feature all had lovely acceptance speeches

• Conan’s recurring bits mentioning Estonia; the ball is indeed in their court

• Morgan Freeman paying additional tribute to one of Hollywood’s key legends, Gene Hackman, just before the “In Memoriam” started – I’m certainly not happy for its necessity, but was quite touched

A couple that you can skip:

• Emilia Perez’s win for Best Song, though Mick Jagger presenting was fun

• The aforementioned Bond extravaganza

• If you’re looking for fun/odd reactions from Oscar attendee stalwarts like Leonardo DiCaprio, Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep or Nicole Kidman, you won’t get them this year. It seems that since COVID, that caliber of celebrity only attends if their film has nominations, and even then, Tom Cruise skipped for Top Gun: Maverick

Anora: The Big Winner. This is a great movie that makes for an excellent Best Picture winner and I’m glad this is where we ended up. While I prefer Nickel Boys, Anora would be my second choice of the nominated films, and I heartily recommend it as well as The Brutalist, which would be my third. Those three all belong in “Best of the Decade” conversations, which is fewer than last year, where I found 5 (Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, The Zone of Interest, Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall). I think that’s a reflection of the year in movies in general, but in the absence of a commercial smash that’s also a critical sensation to the degree that Oppenheimer was, the Academy was free to elevate the kind of work that wouldn’t have had a shot 10 years ago. Not just because of the graphic nudity in the first hour of the film, or the amount of profanity (subject of a great joke by Conan), or even the fact that that this is as much a comedy as it is a drama, but because a $6 million indie about a sex worker featuring a starless cast never used to get this kind of attention at the Academy. It’s awesome that this is the kind of stuff that wins Best Picture now. One other factoid for you: by winning for Writing, Editing, Directing and Best Picture (Producer), Sean Baker won 4 Oscars in one night – that’s more than a lot of people have, and the most ever attached to a single film. Historic and deserving. In terms of recent winners, I think it may be the best since 2019’s Parasite.

But less about the profile of the movie, and more about the movie itself. It’s a remarkable feat of structure, giving us a high-octane whirlwind romance told with a beautifully modern indie sensibility that feels as immediately timeless as it does fresh. However, it takes a turn into screwball comedy territory in its second hour that moves at a radically different pace and a slightly different tone without missing a beat or betraying the film to that point before closing with a quiet and contemplative chapter that asks its audience to do a little soul-searching. Sean Baker deftly explores themes of wealth, power and cultural identity without ever slipping into melodrama or stakes of true life and death, making this film very smart but never heavy. Mikey Madison is revelatory as the titular Anora, perfectly embodying her character’s attitude, hope, athleticism and occasionally pain. She supplies any missing context for her character, because she feels fully formed even if the specifics of her life before the film are missing; they don’t matter here, which is a testament to both her and Baker. It’s adult entertainment in all definitions of both of those words and manages to capture “now” in a way that seems increasingly rare. The film smartly deploys cell phones into the story – something that many filmmakers today say ruins drama – and the involvement of wealthy Russian oligarchs as a referendum on social class is particularly topical.

How Will the Season be Remembered? Putting aside any complicated feelings about the pageantry of Awards Season or how gamified it gets or about the movies that were never in the conversation vs. frontrunners vs. hopefuls that never hit it big, this stuff takes up an awful lot of my mindshare from roughly November to early March, and now that it’s over I want to look back a little bit.

First and foremost, this year will be remembered for Emilia Perez’s rapid ascension to frontrunner status and equally rapid crash-and-burn, along with the thorny identity politics that it entails. I’m worried that may overshadow Anora’s win in years to come, but I don’t think that will be the case. However, this year confirms that the Golden Globes can still play kingmaker in terms of creating the frontrunners even if they can’t be relied on to predict the winners. In January, Emilia Perez and The Brutalist won a slew of the night’s top awards and immediately became the films to beat. It wasn’t until Anora swept the Writers, Producers, and Directors Guild awards that it turned into an unstoppable freight train. Also, Demi Moore was tabbed as the frontrunner heading into Oscar night, but Mikey Madison triumphed after having only won the BAFTA – being in the film that’s winning Best Picture clearly improves one’s odds, regardless of narrative.

My other two favorite non-Anora contenders of the season, Nickel Boys and The Brutalist, are potentially due for “justice reclamations” in the future, and personally I’ll be waving the flag in memory of Challengers being completely snubbed by the Academy for the foreseeable future, and happy to point folks towards the other stuff I loved that never had a chance (La Chimera, Evil Does Not Exist, Hundreds of Beavers).

I’m not sure what next year will bring but I know one thing: the small films that are celebrated by critics DO have a chance now, maybe even a better one than your favorite blockbuster of the year. The key challenge remains getting stuff seen, but social media has allowed for a new kind of word of mouth and anticipation building that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Now that we’ll be two years removed from the Writer’s Guild strike in 2023, and looking at the Best Picture nominees from the past two years, I’m hopeful the industry will further embrace movies for adults in the $20 million - $50 million range. If this year is proof of anything, it’s that great filmmakers can do great things for less.