Sean Baker’s “Anora” made history at the 97th Academy Awards when it nearly swept its nominations. Baker took home four statuettes (tying only Walt Disney) while breakout star Mikey Madison pulled an upset over popular industry veterans. There are a myriad of reasons why this film’s success is so monumental, and all of them refuse to neatly fit into the box of a typical Best Picture winner. Everything from its story and content (an unrestrained, near two and a half hour long, tragicomedy) to its background (a run-and-gun indie hailing from a filmmaker whose work has mostly been celebrated in smaller circles prior to this) are far from the popular picks of the “Gladiator” variety or even the smaller-scale, yet still crowd-pleasing likes of “Birdman.” It points to a bright future ahead for the widespread recognition of independent cinema, while calling to mind the few yet unforgettable instances where out-of-the-ordinary films were bestowed with the coveted prize.
Prior to the 1970s, musicals and historical epics dominated this category with a handful of sharply written romances and satires also going all the way. This pattern was radically broken by William Friedkin’s propulsive cop thriller “The French Connection” (1971), which stood out with its down-and-dirty attitude, blatant cynicism and gritty critique of contemporary America. Even the decade’s more “normal” winners were still unlike what came before: both “Godfather” films carried more existential dread than most previous epics.
Grandiose biopics started making a comeback that would last through much of the 1990s and early 2000s, though Jonathan Demme’s momentous psychological horror thriller “The Silence of the Lambs” defied expectations and became one of the very few films to win the so-called “Big Five” – the awards for best picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay.
The winners in the 2000s are quite varied but only one gives pause. The Coens’ slyly philosophical neo-Western “No Country for Old Men” is the only film from this decade that doesn’t conform to these labels so easily.
In the 2010s, history was made: Barry Jenkins’ enchanting indie “Moonlight,” centering around the queer and Black experience beat out throwback musical “La La Land;” Guillermo del Toro’s romantic fantasy “The Shape of Water” took home the big award of the night; and Bong Joon-ho’s withering social thriller “Parasite” famously broke new ground by becoming the first non-English language film to win.
The 2020s pandemic and drastic shifts within the industry yielded some of the most fascinating results in Oscar history. Female directors won back-to-back with Chloe Zhao’s elegiac Recession-era “Nomadland” and Sian Heder’s sweet coming-of-age dramedy “CODA.” What might be the most bizarre and exciting sweep in the show’s lifetime, is the genre-bending movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” This somehow features heavy themes like generational trauma alongside an interdimensional bagel of doom and buttplug-enhanced fights. The end result is so powerful and innovative that it won the hearts of even the norm-skewing Oscar voters.
Even mainstream director Christopher Nolan’s epic biopic “Oppenheimer” rejects conventions with its fractured timelines and apocalyptic tone, and now the massive success of “Anora” adds to this exhilarating streak of films that would usually be snubbed as the biggest winners of Oscar night. We’ll see if the Academy continues to support this wide variety of voices and stories; however, if this relieving punctuation to a chaotic awards season is any indication, we might be able to look forward to consistent recognition of the weird and the underrepresented.
