Earlier this month the film Anora, directed by Sean Baker, walked away on Oscar night with four of its most prestigious awards. The awards in question were Best Picture for the film as a whole, Best Actress for Mikey Madison, Best Director for Sean Baker and Best Original Screenplay for Baker, but was Anora good enough to take home the crown in all of these factors?
As much as people might disagree with me, I do not believe that it should’ve earned all of the Oscars that it did. Specifically, I believe that the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay could have found a better home next to a few other movies on this year’s Oscar list. The reason I feel that way is due to what I consider the biggest letdown of this movie, the simplicity in its narrative.
When you boil this movie down to its most basic of parts, there are only a handful of real plot progressing scenes that you are left with and many of them last longer than you would first suspect. I mean, going back to the movie to do research for this piece, I was shocked to see that this film had a nearly two hour and 20 minute runtime as with the amount that actually occurred in this movie, I had mistaken the length for only being a little over 90 minutes.
This kind of script that lingers in the actual progression of the movie itself makes you start to realize while you are watching how long you have been seeing the same scene play out. The biggest example of this in the film is the scene where Russian henchmen are watching over Anora, mostly called Ani in the film, once Ani’s new husband Vanya has run off after seeing that his father had sent the henchmen to find him. The whole ordeal takes a hefty chunk of the film’s runtime with so many scenes of these henchmen falling over themselves that it rivals old slapstick comedy.
It is scenes like that and others that follow the same grain that are plentiful in Anora’s runtime which make me feel like the script itself is bogged down and that there were better options when it came to deciding which script out of the whole year’s is deserving to be called the best. When you are judging what film is to be the best picture overall, you need to look at all aspects of the film and if the script itself is lacking then there is strong reason to believe that it should not be considered one of the best pictures of the given year.
Now I hope that I haven’t fully lost you yet as I did say that the movie did not deserve two of its wins. In fact, I think the other two Oscars won were complete blow outs for the most part in their respective category. Starting with Best Actress, it makes perfect sense that the movie is called Anora because it is safe to say that Mikey Madison’s portrayal of Ani IS this movie. She brings to life an interesting character and truly makes it her own to the highest of degrees.
The same can be said about the film’s director, Baker, who makes the film stand out in a very interesting way and makes the beauty of this film tide the viewer over. The creative use of color and the artistic shots and settings give the film its own kind of look that allows the movie to stand on its own, especially against its own competition, which outside of The Substance, played it rather safe with its visuals. So I would say that an Oscar win for Baker was not only expected but appreciated on my part.
While I do not agree with some of the wins that this move got, it does not mean that I do not see where they are coming from. I want to make sure I put this out there and say that I really did like this movie, in fact when I watched the Oscar movies in preparation for awards night, I placed Anora as number four out of the 10, only edged out in a very close race by The Substance, Conclave and Wicked.
What Anora had as an almost X factor over the rest and what I think made it outperform, was that a movie like this could not have come out to the public at a more perfect time.
This movie released on Nov. 8, and just a couple months earlier the album Brat by Charli XCX had taken the world by storm and the idea of being “Brat” was the trend that was sweeping the nation. While the exact meaning of brat changes from source to source, it is understood universally that the character of Anora is brat. And people being able to see someone live a textbook example of the lifestyle that was such a craze months prior and at the time shot the film’s popularity and success beyond the stars.
Overall I am happy that this movie won the awards that I feel it deserved. And while I think that the others could have gone to some other movies, this is a net positive for the world of film as a whole as it shows future filmmakers that they can be more experimental in their filmmaking and reap just as many awards in the process.
