It is hard to imagine a more charming Oscar winner than Sean Baker. The director – and writer, editor and producer – of Anora was wonderfully persuasive and gracious and fluent at the Academy Awards. He was funny picking up best editing, and then he was sweet accepting the screenwriter prize.
When it came to the directing gong, he was downright godlike: the podium his soapbox, superbly leveraged for a gang-busting call to arms about the importance of cinema and the need for people to support bricks and mortar venues.
So it pains me to say this, but I don’t really think Anora deserved all those wins. Maybe even – sorry, sorry – any of them. I came to the film a bit late, after colleagues had already raved to me about its exhilarating plot and kinetic brio. As someone often lucky enough to see things early, then raise expectations a bit too high, and feel bad about it, I was aware I might not be quite as wowed as those evangelisers.
What I wasn’t expecting was to be downright baffled. Baker’s film seems to me maybe the fifth least vital of an admittedly not-earth-shattering best picture lineup: hollow, flippant, muddled, slightly dull. A cool-for-school firework display of sub-Sopranos suppleness and flexing.
It doesn’t seem to me sure what it is. The swerve at the halfway mark between giddy romance to screechy screwball doesn’t seem artfully Hitchcockian but just sort of random. There’s a throughline both in narrative and tone in Baker’s other films – most notably Tangerine – whereas Anora’s U-bend plotting just felt badly-fitted.
Overall, too, its attempts to be both gen Z-TikTok-tastic fun and a serious commentary on currency, capitalism and corruption didn’t square for me. How about that bit where Vanya’s parents’ enforcer answers his phone at a christening, then ditches the baby with its mum because he must attend to his errant charge? Yeah! Great! But also … not as good as Father Ted?
The characterisation doesn’t seem much deeper. The brittleness of caricature with which Vanya’s parents were drawn made the final act tedious. That his dad cacklingly sided with Anora over his ghastly alpha wife was disingenuous and tasted of something more misogynist, too.
Vayna was just a spoilt kid; Igor had fewer hidden depths than I could discern, and Anora herself had little inner life between stylishly dropping her togs, squirrelling 50s and getting endlessly let down.
Mikey Madison is tremendous and owns the part, as you’d sort of hope she might as it was written for her. And I’m all for a sex positive soap with lashings of Take That. But there does feel something slightly iffy about Madison’s repeated shoutouts of allyship to sex workers. “I just want to say that I see you,” she said at the Baftas – and then again at the Oscars. “You deserve respect and human decency. I will always be a friend and an ally, and I implore others to do the same.”
Iffy not just because you’d hope that would go without saying, but because Anora makes prostitution look fun, safe and lucrative. Perhaps it can be. And it’s true Anora’s job is the crux of her new in-laws’ disapproval. But combatting professional prejudice should you impulsively marry the heir to a Russian fortune just doesn’t feel that pressing or relatable an issue.
Anyway, it’s won, it’s done, Baker’s great even if his film didn’t strike me the same way. He’s trying to save cinema, and he’s succeeding. I just hope his next intervention has a bit more heart.
Read more about the 2025 Oscars:
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Anora takes home best picture Oscar
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Adrien Brody and Mikey Madison win best acting prizes
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Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña win supporting awards
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Anora’s Sean Baker wins for directing, editing and screenplay
Source: theguardian.com
