Commentary: 'Anora's' Oscars triumph is a much-needed win for workers, in Hollywood and beyond
Sean Baker got his fairy-tale ending, investing his speeches with meaningful shout-outs on an Oscar night that celebrated unseen laborers as well as glamour.
When filmmaker Sean Baker won his first Oscar for original screenplay early Sunday night for âAnora,â a screwball dramedy about a stripper who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, he gave an acceptance speech so heartfelt and complete, heaping praise on everyone from his cast and crew to his distributors and management team, that I wondered if heâd thanked himself into a corner.
If Baker won anything else, what would he have left to say?
I shouldnât have worried. There would be more awards, four in total for Baker himself: landmark wins for writing, editing, directing and producing âAnora.â And Baker would have plenty more to add.
A successful Oscar campaign makes a series of whistle-stop speeches. Bakerâs been delivering them since âAnoraâ won the Palme dâOr in May. Gratitude can get rote. But Baker never gave the same speech twice, shaping each thank-you into a bullâs-eye aimed at the occasion.
His Indie Spirit speech rightly noted that independent directors like him stretch one paycheck across years of unpaid work pushing to get a movie made. âWe are creating product that creates jobs and revenue for the entire industry,â Baker said. âWe shouldnât be barely getting by.â My entire social media feed posted clips of his cri de cĆur covered in clapping emojis. I loved it too. Although for me, that speech was tied with the one Baker gave at the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. Awards where he charmed a roomful of movie journalists by whipping out a film review he had written in high school. It was an impassioned rave for the 1988 horror remake âThe Blob,â addressed to the letters section of Fangoria magazine.
At the Oscars, Bakerâs speeches were idiosyncratic and gracious. Accepting the award for editing, Baker elevated his fellow nominees by calling the craft âhalf of my directing and a third of my screenwriting.â Clutching his statuette for director, he put the spotlight on the struggling theatrical business and urged distributors and audiences alike to value the big screen. Loping back one last time for best picture, Baker ceded the microphone to his co-producers Alex Coco and Samantha Quan and popped in only for a 10-second shoutout to the academy for recognizing a truly indie $6-million movie. âLong live independent film!â he whooped.
The crowd whooped back. History was made. Independent film has a new ambassador, a ceremonial sharing â if not passing â of the torch made literal when Quentin Tarantino handed Baker his third prize. For what itâs worth, Baker now has twice as many Oscars as Tarantino, who, to date, has inconceivably only won two of them, both for original screenplay. Hey, maybe Baker will someday get to hand the director statuette to him.
Baker made a point of paying his âdeepest respectâ to the sex-worker community who inspired the film. Eleven actresses have won Oscars for playing prostitutes. âAnoraâsâ lead actress Mikey Madison (more on her win in a minute) makes it 12. Of the 10 previous acceptance speeches I can find, no other winners felt comfortable giving a nod to their muses, and Iâll assume Janet Gaynor, who won in 1929 for âStreet Angel,â and Helen Hayes, who won in 1932 for âThe Sin of Madelon Claudet,â were similarly mum.
âAnoraâ is about sex work, yes. But itâs really about work work. The film feels wild and loose when four characters are shouting over each other at once. Yet, almost every scene is a comment on the desperation of struggling paycheck to paycheck in America. While Madisonâs Ani fights to stay married into life-changing money, the other minor characters are simply fighting to keep their gigs. Once youâre looking for it, job instability underlines every interaction in the film, from the Las Vegas hotel manager terrified to tell rich brat Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) that his suite isnât ready, to the nightclub waitress stuck with Vanyaâs $800 tab, to the tow-truck driver panicked that the billionaireâs brutes have broken his vehicle. âBeen on the job two weeks,â he wails.
Even the Russian minions who strong-arm Ani to get an annulment are a matryoshka doll of servants and masters, with Yura Borisovâs Igor taking orders from Vache Tovmasyanâs Garnik, who takes orders from Karren Karagulianâs Toros, all the way up to Aleksey Serebryakovâs plutocrat Nikolai, who, of course, cedes control to his icy wife, Galina (Darya Ekamasova).
Employment is fickle unless youâre at the tippy-top, with a private jet at your command. Ani is the one character who continually, and loudly, advocates for her own value. âWhen you give me health insurance, workersâ comp and a 401(k), then you can tell me when I work,â she claps back to her strip-club boss. The tragedy of âAnoraâ is that even this smart and forceful girl gets crushed by wealth. Only the Russian billionaires end the film without a scratch â or bruise, broken nose or busted SUV.
There were two clues this was going to be âAnoraâsâ night. One was the way Baker scampered off after his second win with a casual wave, an unconscious signal that it was dawning on him that the eveningâs momentum might bring him back up there again. The other came in host Conan OâBrienâs opening-monologue pledge to shine a light on the hardworking craftspeople behind the camera, i.e., the artists who buttress the stars.
Mikey Madison, star of âAnora,â swept to a lead actress victory.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The showâs executive producers Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan and director Hamish Hamilton made good on that vow. Last year, the Oscars goosed their A-list glitz by having each acting award presented by five celebrities who expressed their admiration for every nominee. Lupita Nyongâo brought supporting actress winner DaâVine Joy Randolph to tears even before her name was called. This year, though, that laser beam of glamour instead highlighted two technical categories, with the performers of each nominated film paying rapturous homage to below-the-liners who make them look good. Minor exceptions were Bowen Yang, whose self-mockingly snotty type of comedy doesnât allow for sincerity (at least his âWickedâ costumer won), and the glaring absence of Angelina Jolie for âMariaâsâ cinematography nod (ironically, the show was forced to send out her characterâs maid).
OâBrien did fantastic. His Oscars was determined to entertain yet never oblivious to this uneasy moment in time. âBallâs in your court, Estonia,â OâBrien joked when winners made Oscars history, first when âFlowâ director Gints Zilbalodis became the first Latvian to win an Academy Award, and again when âWickedâsâ Paul Tazewell became the first Black man to win for costume design. For those keeping count, OâBrien could have made that joke at least twice more for supporting actress Zoe Saldaña (the first for an American of Dominican origin) and international feature winner âIâm Still Hereâ (astonishingly, the first-ever Oscar for Brazil). Beginning with âParasiteâsâ best picture win in 2020, the international scope of the last several Oscars is starting to feel like a warning: If Hollywoodâs increasingly cash-poor artists donât get more support, thereâs enough talent around the globe to leave our town in the dust.
For the last two months and for nearly all of the night, prognosticators felt comfortable predicting that Demi Moore would claim her own much-anticipated statuette for âThe Substance.â Moore is fantastic as a once award-winning superstar who gets Stockholm-syndromed by a chauvinistic industry into believing that her only value is a bouncy set of buns. Mooreâs campaign was a salute to perseverance, to a body of work made rawly literal when, after she played a sex worker in âStriptease,â people fixated on her thighs and breasts. Sheâs labored for acknowledgment for decades. Just last week at the Screen Actors Guild awards, she once again won over the room reminding them that sheâd gotten her SAG card in 1978 at the age of 15. Holding that seemingly auspicious prize, she choked up trying to find the words she wanted to say to teenage Moore, âthat little girl who didnât believe in herself.â
But Moore lost and the loss hurt, even though thereâs no question that âAnoraâsâ young breakout star was equally good at carrying a movie on her be-thonged back. Part of the pain is that Moore is two-and-a-half times Madisonâs age but is only now being offered the kind of roles that prove her worth.
And part of the salve is that Madison is ascending in an era that is (hopefully) writing more female parts worth playing for actors of all demographics. This year, the average age of all five lead actress nominees was a respectable 47. Hereâs an idea: Now that both Baker and Moore have everyoneâs attention and goodwill, how about they team up for another bold indie thatâll once more bring the dogged, weary, film-loving workers of Hollywood to their feet. .
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