The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a club notoriously made of old, White male voters, rarely picks films that delight, over a grand narrative, when it comes to Best Picture.
So serious are the Oscars about themselves that it’s only four times that a film has taken home both the Cannes festival’s best honour — known to go to more edgy, experimental and foreign cinema — and the Academy’s. The last one was Parasite in 2019; before that it happened in 1955. On Monday, Anora joined the list.
Even in that august company, Anora is an exception, with explicit content that usually leaves the Academy cold and its unusually humanising depiction of the group of Russians whose paths cross with the titular character — Hollywood has rarely accorded them such warmth in a mainstream film.
As Anora proceeds — a trot at 2 hours and 19 minutes compared to some of its more “serious” and heavy-on-their-feet contenders — none of them sticks to form.
Anora or Ani, as she prefers to be called, is neither the sex worker with a heart of gold nor one with a pot of bad luck. She is anti-Cinderella and anti-Pretty Woman, a 23-year-old who isn’t looking out for a fairy grandmother or a Prince Charming. The only crystal on her is the shiny diamond ring that she demands from Ivan, who turns out to be riding — like all princes are — on his parents’ coattails.
Mikey Madison, just 25 and the Best Actress winner, is phenomenal as the gutsy, feisty, fearless Ani who confounds the Russian prince’s Russian keepers, trying hopelessly to keep her down or to keep Ivan up — literally.
A large part of the film is shot in the New York quarters inhabited by Russians, with Ani herself partly Russian. It would be so easy to paint them as the usual gruff, cruel, bloodthirsty Russians — or lawless migrants like the ones who run rampant through Emilia Perez — who are apparently threatening America’s cities.
However, in Sean Baker’s hilarious script, they are as much powerless cogs in the wheel as Ani. They are sent scurrying at the command of a Russian oligarch, who flies in and out of America on a jet unhindered by any sanctions, showing that money oils all wheels.
It’s amidst the urgency to get a divorce – another of the film’s ironies – that the drama and romance of Anora blossoms. As snowfall engulfs a car in which the last scene unfolds, this could be as much a dream that may end at the first ray of sun, or the start of a new day.
On a night that Anora took five Academy awards, Yuriy Borisov — the watchful, almost silent, completely disposable henchman, who is the only one who comes remotely close to a heart of gold in the film — lost out on Best Supporting Actor. As geopolitics goes, notwithstanding President Donald Trump’s full tilt at the windmills, there is only so far the Oscars could have gone with Borisov; his nomination was celebrated back home in Russia as a “victory” of Olympian magnitude.
For the most part though, Monday proved that the Academy could rise above constraints beyond art to recognise an indie film made on a budget of $6 million (last year’s Best Picture, Oppenheimer, ran up $100 million) that touches without trying too hard – for example, not going much into the hard lives of sex workers, or the easy lives of princelings, or the blowback of hard-partying, drug-addled ways.
Of the nine other films in contention for Best Picture, one dealt with a dirty Vatican power play behind the selection of a Pope (Conclave seemed “right”, given Pope Francis’s ailment); another with the stark cruelties of war and migrant life (The Brutalist, more the Academy’s style); the third adapted a popular Broadway play (crowd favourite Wicked); the fourth was a grand spectacle as well as a hardworking sequel (a made-to-overwhelm Dune 2); the fifth was a polished biopic of Bob Dylan (A Complete Unknown, with Timothee Chalamet); the sixth brought a movie veteran in from the cold (The Substance, seen as Demi Moore’s redemption); the seventh put a trans woman front and centre (Emilia Perez, though it ran into difficulties of its own); and eighth and nine films that had a chance if the Academy were thus inclined (I’m Still Here about Brazil’s forced disappearances, and Nickel Boys about an abusive reform school, based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel).
In such larger schemes of things, Anora matters little. But it invoked what Baker, who made history winning four individual Oscars — for Best Director, Screenplay, Editing and Picture for Anora — harked to in his speech: The magic of small films making big cinema.
shalini.langer@expressindia.com
