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Bookies are hardly a trustful barometer when it comes to the Oscars, but this year I’m hoping they’ve at least got Best Picture right – because as it turns out, in a rare meeting of minds, we’re both pulling for Sean Baker’s Anora this weekend.
Increasingly, it seems the world agrees. Each of its wins on the awards circuit so far (DGA, PGA, Bafta to name a few) have secured its chances just that bit more; as it stands, Anora leads the pack in overall Best-Picture trophy count over fellow nominees including Conclave and The Brutalist. There is, admittedly, something terribly uncool about rooting for the favourite, but even a blind pig (the Academy) finds a truffle occasionally. And Anora is as delicious as they come.
A rags to riches tale for 2025, the film begins with Anora, or Ani as she prefers to be called, working as a stripper at a Midtown Manhattan club when a new client (the boisterous, boyish Vanya played by Mark Eydelshteyn) asks for a Russian-speaking dancer. They hit it off. He offers her $15,000 to be his live-in girlfriend for the week; she haggles him to $25,000 and so begins a spell of partying and sex that concludes in a Las Vegas wedding. There is also, amid the drugs and fur coats, genuine affection between the two. The brakes are put on when Vanya’s oligarch parents catch wind of the marriage and send their goons (including the Oscar-nominated Yura Borisov as the soulful, sweet Igor) to squash it.
The film, which mixes elements of slapstick and romcom with heavy drama, is not so much a play on the Pretty Woman trope as it is a glitter bomb implosion of it. The American dream has its limits, and Baker’s film tests them all. It’s worth noting here, as one reviewer did, that Anora is the only nominee in the Best Picture category that is set in the quote-unquote here and now; the others take place in fantasy realms or past decades. But in addition to being a commentary on class, labour, and sex work, Anora is also very simply entertaining. There is a superbly off-kilter fight sequence, an array of zany one-liners, and a by-the-numbers enemies-to-lovers arc that’s impossible to resist.
At the centre of it all is Mikey Madison. After small but memorable parts as an acid-soaked Charles Manson acolyte in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and an unassuming Ghostface in the Scream franchise, Anora arrived at an opportune moment for the actor, a star-making role if ever there was one. And as the hard-talking, fast-speaking Ani, Madison goes for broke.
She puts to use skills she honed playing Pamela Adlon’s eldest daughter in FX’s superb five-season series Better Things – youthful naivety manifesting as confidence. She is a calloused ball of self-preservation coming apart against her better judgement at the alluring promise of Vanya’s Cinderella fantasy.
If we’re talking Oscar worthiness, as a character Anora possesses many of the winning prerequisites. Madison learnt a new language (passable Russian); nailed a tricky accent (earning the stamp of approval from notoriously hard-to-please Brooklynites); and endured a physically demanding transformation (she worked intensively with a dance instructor to perfect her stripper scenes). More than any of that, though, Madison captures Ani’s spirit – telegraphing hope and devastation in a single look.
When Baker frames her face in the centre of his 35mm widescreen composition as he does regularly throughout the film, it’s impossible not to see a star in the making – the threads of tinsel catching the light against her black hair.
For all its fable-like qualities – damsel in distress, burly brutes, white knight – the film feels completely real. No doubt partly down to the fact that Baker shot it entirely on location: in a real-life strip club, mansion, candy shop, restaurant, gas station, pool hall, airport, hotel, and other such places. Into the mix of professional actors, Baker threw in nonprofessionals, only adding to its lived-in quality.
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There is also, in my mind, at least, a sense that Baker is overdue an Oscar. That he is receiving his first-ever nods for Anora is strange given the greatness of The Florida Project, his tender tale of motel-dwelling children, and Tangerine, his even better iPhone-shot comedy about transgender sex workers. I’ll end on the fact that Anora was also responsible for one of the greatest needle drops in recent memory. An EDM remix of Take That’s “Greatest Day” set to a series of gyrating hips over men’s laps? Perfection.
