Why ‘Anora’ dominated the Oscars, including Mikey Madison’s big win
Published Mar 03, 2025 • 6 minute read
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Mikey Madison, winner of the Best Actress in a Leading Role for “Anora”, poses in the press room during the 97th Annual Oscars at Ovation Hollywood on March 2, 2025 in Hollywood, Calif. Photo by Mike Coppola /Getty ImagesReviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
The more Hollywood changes, the more it remains the same.
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Let us count the ways that “Anora” running the tables at the 97th Academy Awards is a groundbreaking accomplishment. Mikey Madison, at 25, is the ninth-youngest best actress winner. Sean Baker is the first person to win four Oscars for the same movie: He produced, directed, wrote and edited it, winning statues for every hat he wore. “Anora” is a genuinely independent film, made on a budget of $6 million – roughly 3% of what it cost to make “Dune: Part Two” – and, until Sunday night, it lacked major movie stars.
And yet, and yet. What is it about the Academy’s love affair with women who sell their bodies? In 1961, the best actress Oscar went to Elizabeth Taylor in “BUtterfield 8” for playing a “party girl” who admits to her mother that she’s “the slut of all time.” In 1972, Jane Fonda won the award as call girl Bree Daniels in Alan J. Pakula’s thriller “Klute.” And they weren’t the first: There’s Helen Hayes in “The Sin of Madelon Claudet” (1931), Donna Reed in “From Here to Eternity” (1953), Susan Hayward in “I Want to Live!” (1958), Shirley Jones in “Elmer Gantry” (1960). Just last year, Emma Stone won best actress as the Frankenhooker of Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things.”
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Actresses nominated for playing what we now call sex workers and used to call rawer names include Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961), Elisabeth Shue in “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995) and 12-year-old Jodie Foster as the preteen prostitute of “Taxi Driver” (1976). And of course, there’s Julia Roberts, whose breakthrough role as streetwalker Vivian Ward in Garry Marshall’s “Pretty Woman” (1990) is the now-classic iteration of Hollywood’s “hooker with a heart of gold” trope.
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“Anora” seems consciously built as a rejoinder to that film. It’s in no way a celebration of the title character’s line of work – Ani (Madison) is a stripper at a Manhattan men’s club who negotiates a week of “companionship” with the spoiled son (Mark Eydelshteyn) of a Russian oligarch – but in no way does it condemn her, either. Like Baker’s other movies, including “Tangerine” (2015), “The Florida Project” (2017) and “Red Rocket” (2021), “Anora” presents sex as a business, a commodity in a capitalist system that carries its own freedoms and risks for the people who purvey it, most of them women. Baker just disguises his empathetic, uninflected social observations in a narrative that juggles drama and farce, acrid characters and human folly. The movie feels like something brand new, and it is. But, on some of the levels it’s being received, “Anora” is the same old story.
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Sunday night’s ceremony was notable in other ways, one of them being that it wasn’t very notable at all. The evening progressed smoothly, with no eruptions of scandal – no audience members taking the stage to slap a presenter, no aging stars handed the wrong envelope. Conan O’Brien lacked the slick professionalism of Jimmy Kimmel’s recent hosting duties; instead, he was engaging, silly and tart. For old-timers watching at home, Billy Crystal arriving with “When Harry Met Sally …” co-star Meg Ryan at the end of the evening to present the award for best picture was a sigh of nostalgia for Oscar telecasts of the past, as was the somber In Memoriam segment, scored to Mozart’s “Requiem” (inviting social media controversy) and culminating with farewells to David Lynch, James Earl Jones and the recently departed Gene Hackman.
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You could say that Kieran Culkin pressed his luck after winning best supporting actor for “A Real Pain” with a cringe-inducing anecdote about getting his wife pregnant. You could say that best actor winner Adrien Brody (“The Brutalist”) gave a speech that seemed almost as long as the movie for which he won. (He won the same award for “The Pianist” 20 years ago and saw his career fail to take off, so maybe he can be forgiven for the emotionalism.) You could cheer and cry for Zoe Saldaña, best supporting actress for “Emilia Pérez” – one of only two Oscars (“El Mal” also took best song) won by the most-nominated film of the night – as she tearfully accepted her statue as the first Dominican to win an Academy Award.
And you could genuinely applaud the growing internationalism and independence of the Oscars as its centenary swings into view. A tiny Latvian animated feature made for $3.5 million, the miraculous “Flow,” beat out big guns from Pixar (“Inside Out 2”) and DreamWorks (“The Wild Robot”). Brazil’s “I’m Still Here” won best international feature, sweet revenge for director Walter Salles, who lost in this category in 1998 for “Central Station,” whose Oscar-nominated star, Fernanda Montenegro, is the mother of the new film’s Oscar-nominated star, Fernanda Torres. “The Brutalist,” which also won for cinematography and score, is an epic made on a $10 million shoestring by Brady Corbet, a 36-year-old actor turned auteur.
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In one of the evening’s most dramatic turns, the Israeli-Palestinian co-production “No Other Land” won best documentary feature. A gut-wrenching film immensely sympathetic to the Palestinian villagers whose homes and schools are bulldozed by the Israel Defence Forces, it is possibly the first feature film to win an Oscar while lacking U.S. distribution, and the achievement flies in the face of Hollywood’s long-standing antipathy to the Palestinian cause – remember Vanessa Redgrave getting booed for her “Zionist hoodlums” speech in 1978? Filmmakers Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham gave perhaps the evening’s most moving speeches, with the latter calling for a “different path, a political solution” to Israel’s intractable quandary and criticizing the United States for “helping to block that path.” “Why can’t you see that we are intertwined, that my people can be truly safe [only] if Basel’s people are truly free and safe?” Abraham pleaded.
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That was the rare, raw note of reality in a strenuously apolitical night. The names Trump and Musk were never spoken; the closest anyone came to an actual opinion was host O’Brien cracking that “Anora” became a hit because “Americans are excited to finally see someone stand up to a powerful Russian.” If you were of a certain age, it was enough to make you pine for the trenchant political analysis of Oscar speeches in the 1970s.
And while, in the eyes of many (including this critic, who still thinks the best film of 2024 is “Nickel Boys”), “Anora” deserves its golden statues, there are ironies aplenty in its conquering of the Academy. Eras and social mores change, but Madison is just the latest talented actress to be praised for the “realism” of her sex-worker role, as Hayes, Taylor, Fonda and Shue were in their time. (Not Julia Roberts, but it was 1990, and no one wanted grit.)
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Perhaps most dissonant of all was seeing Madison, the latest ingenue to be raised up to the awards dais, beat out Demi Moore. Moore’s role in Coralie Fargeat’s allegorical horror story, “The Substance” – an aging Hollywood star desperate to recapture her youth – is a cruelly apt metaphor for the way an industry run by men and the culture it serves treat women as disposable objects with a sell-by date. Madison winning best actress – for playing a stripper, no less – is almost literally the subject of “The Substance,” so much so that one almost felt co-star Margaret Qualley should have accepted the statue while Moore sprayed the Dolby Theatre in a massive explosion of blood and viscera, just like in her movie. But that’s Hollywood, where on-screen gore wins the Oscar for special effects, the real violence is done with smiles and unreturned phone calls and the music eventually plays you off, no matter how many awards you win.
— Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
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