But that’s 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 d’Or 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 d’Or winners have been nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards, including Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (also distributed by Neon), which became the first non-English language movie to win Hollywood’s 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 and a film comfortable, even proud of the label of “cinema”.
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 an Oscars that host Conan O’Brien 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.
