When Sean Bakers Anora swept the 97th Academy Awards on Sunday, its five wins, including best picture, signaled a different kind of Oscar winner. Anora, about an erotic dancer (Mikey Madison) who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, is a typically sexually explicit film for a best picture winner. The cast and crew of Anora wholeheartedly accepted the award for best picture during the Oscars on Mar 2, 2025, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

Last fall, Sean Baker was sitting in a Manhattan restaurant, talking about a poll. The survey, about sex in movies and television, showed that Gen Z moviegoers were mostly turned off by sex in film. That broke my heart. I thought, theres something wrong here, said Baker. Youre okay with all the violence thats out there? Sex is a vital part of existence. Why dont you want to see sex in our stories?

Sean Baker, winner of the awards for best original screenplay, best film editing, best director, and best picture for Anora, attended the Governors Ball after the Oscars on Mar 2, 2025, in Los Angeles. A young womans relationship to her sexuality has not been, historically speaking, in the Oscars’ wheelhouse.

Mikey Madison also arrived at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California.

But thats just one quality that makes Anora unique as a best picture winner. The film, made for US$6 million (S$8.07 million) and distributed by Neon, was made with little interest in the mainstream. If anything, Anora was more oriented to the Cannes Film Festival, the French citadel of cinema, where it won the Palme dOr last May a prize that Baker said, meant the most to him.

But increasingly, these are converging movie worlds. In the last five years, four Palme dOr winners have been nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards, including Bong Joon Hos Parasite (also distributed by Neon), which became the first non-English language movie to win Hollywoods top prize.

Anora, a film that inverts a Hollywood fairy tale like Pretty Woman, is like many of the winners on Sunday an unabashedly modern movie. In a movie industry where manufactured franchise stewardship rules the day, Anora was celebrated, in part, because it’s the real deal.

It’s also a more traditional choice than it might seem. Baker, a filmmaker who has sworn off making a series, a studio film or anything for streaming, is an apostle of ’70s cinema.

At the Oscars, that host Conan OBrien called the 97th Longform Content Awards, Anora which shared some of the same Brooklyn streets as The French Connection stood for upholding an increasingly threatened theatrical legacy, with Baker ardently defending a very old-fashioned thing: The big screen. Sean Baker accepted the award for best director for Anora during the Oscars on Mar 2, 2025, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

Filmmakers, keep making films for the big screen. I know I will, Baker said from the Dolby Theatre stage. Distributors, please focus first and foremost on the theatrical releases of your films. Parents, introduce your children to feature films in movie theatres and you will be molding the next generation of movie lovers and filmmakers. And for all of us, when we can please watch movies in a theatre and lets keep the great tradition of the moviegoing experience alive and well.

Independent Moviemaking

The coronation of Anora was a triumph for independent moviemaking, but thats also been a battle waged and won before. What was different this year was that the stiffest competition for Anora wasnt Wicked or Dune: Part Two or any other studio product. All of the major award winners hailed from movies made independently. At the Oscars, the studios are out of the picture.

That trend has been developing for years, but the 97th Academy Awards showed just how much things have changed. That win, like those for Anora, suggested the academys international voters have emerged as a dominant bloc. When the academy, reacting to pressure to diversify its ranks, brought in new members in recent years, it cast a wide net overseas. Hundreds of new international voters people more likely to favor what succeeds in Cannes or Venice now significantly sway the Oscars.

What does that mean for the Academy Awards going forward?

A further tilt toward indie and arthouse cinema will surely alienate some viewers. Just as assuredly as an Anora Academy Awards might turn some away, it could also inspire a new generation of cinephiles. Anora is at turns screwball farce, neorealistic drama, capitalism satire and devastating tragicomedy. Its arguably one of the best picture winners of recent years, a movie that tries on nearly every genre before concluding in an unforgettable scene that catapults Anora into something classic and outside of time.

What aftershocks will follow Baker’s Oscar romp remains to be seen. But shortly after the Academy Awards concluded, 3.9 magnitude tremors were felt in nearby Burbank a fitting coda for the small quake of Anora.