How ‘Anora’ won Best Picture at the Oscars
In the end, it was Anora all along. Sean Baker’s outrageous comedy won Best Picture at the Oscars on Sunday night, one of five awards the film took home during the ceremony, including a historic four wins for Baker (Best Editor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture as a producer). The Anora Best Picture win put a bow on this year’s wild and unpredictable awards season, but the result was far from unexpected. Here are the three reasons why Anora won Best Picture.
It was the frontrunner that looked like an underdog
With its small budget, a cast of largely unknown performers, and Baker’s indelible independent sensibilities as a filmmaker and producer, Anora looked more like upstart Best Picture winners CODA and Parasite than dominant blockbusters Oppenheimer or Everything Everywhere All at Once. However, its underdog patina belied a great strength that was obvious since its Palme d’Or win at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Despite being blanked by the Golden Globes (notably a non-industry group of voters), Anora won at nearly every significant precursor event this year, including the Critics Choice Awards (where it won Best Picture), Producers Guild Awards, Directors Guild Awards, Writers Guild Awards, BAFTA Awards (where Mikey Madison won Best Actress and Baker earned an award for casting), and Spirit Awards. The only place Anora stumbled on its path to Best Picture was at the Screen Actors Guild Awards last week. However, the Neon release was never expected to win at the ceremony anyway. (The cliché about the nomination being its own reward isn’t always true, but in the case of Anora, being nominated by the massive guild was likely victory enough.)
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The stats didn’t lie
After Anora won top honors from the Producers Guild and Directors Guild the same night, it became an overwhelming statistical favorite to win Best Picture. Since 2000, the only movies to win solo awards at the Producers Guild and Directors Guild but lose Best Picture at the Oscars are Brokeback Mountain, La La Land, and 1917. (Gravity also lost Best Picture after winning both honors, but it tied with eventual Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave at the Producers Guild Awards.) The list of Directors Guild Awards winners who lost Best Director over that time frame is similarly small: Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Rob Marshall (Chicago), and Sam Mendes (1917). (Ben Affleck also won at the Directors Guild for Argo in 2013, but Affleck was rather infamously snubbed at the Oscars that year and thus not in competition to win or lose at the ceremony.) Conversely, Conclave, the presumed top threat to Anora heading into Sunday night, was up against history: Never has a movie won Best Picture with victories at the Screen Actors Guild Awards (where Conclave won Best Ensemble) and the BAFTA Awards but without wins at the Directors Guild, Producers Guild, and Writers Guild.
People loved the movie
There’s an old adage that most awards strategists and pundits say during Phase Two of Oscar campaigns: people nominate what they admire and vote for what they love. Ultimately, Anora was just the movie this year with the most passion within the industry. It’s never wise to make Oscar predictions based on anonymous ballots, but note that Anora was the top choice or second choice on the largest number of ballots published online this year. The film’s inherent likability helped it succeed on a preferential ballot twice this season: once at the PGA Awards and again on Sunday at the Oscars. That’s not to say Conclave wasn’t also well-liked — it was anecdotally hard to find someone who didn’t like the movie — but it didn’t have the passion behind it that Anora did. Absent an overwhelming force like Oppenheimer or Everything Everywhere All at Once, Oscar voters listened to Neon’s campaign slogan and followed their hearts.
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