The second was that Sean Baker was going to win best director for Anora. There is precedent for the Academy tipping its hand in this particular category via its choice of presenter: In 2007, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola teamed up to bestow a long-delayed Oscar on their pal Martin Scorsese—a moment no less great for being so obviously stage-managed. Tarantino and Baker don’t have the same kind of personal history, but over the course of this awards season, Baker has assumed Tarantino’s mantle of loud and proud public advocacy on behalf of the theatrical moviegoing experience. “We can laugh together, cry together, scream together, perhaps sit in devastated silence together,” said the filmmaker during his acceptance speech, to whoops of applause. “Movie theaters, especially independently owned movie theaters, are struggling, and it’s up to us to support them.” As Baker spoke, the camera caught Tarantino, himself the proprietor of an independent cinema in Los Angeles, smiling approvingly.
If there’s a trend to be spotted over the last 10 years, it’s that awards for big-studio productions like Oppenheimer have become the exception rather than the rule.
Artistically speaking, Anora easily clears Nomadland and CODA, and also the vast majority of twenty-first-century winners thus far. It’s a fleet, skillful, and entertainingly well-staged screwball comedy blessed with a vivid sense of place and riven with the kind of tension between form and content that makes it, at a minimum, worth seeing. Baker is very good at what he does, even if the precise nature of that achievement, and of the filmmaker’s recursive, almost pathological, immersion in a particular milieu of transactional sexuality, is up for debate. But for all its glancing evocations of class struggle and economic exploitation and bristling, R-rated explicitness—including a near-record 479 instances of the f-word, as duly inventoried by Conan O’Brien during his monologue—Anora hasn’t been designed as any sort of load-bearing cultural statement. It’s long but slight. Its pleasures are immediate and evaporate nearly as quickly.
O’Brien is a canonically funny guy with nothing to prove, and he hosted like it. His performance existed in the sweet spot between puppyish ingratiation in the Billy Crystal mode and sneering, above-it-all indifference à la Seth MacFarlane. He parried entertainingly with a tracksuited Adam Sandler in the audience (Sandler having accrued a remarkable amount of goofball gravitas in the decades between Billy Madison and Uncut Gems), and consolidated the precious time-wasting instincts he cultivated on his talk shows into a production number about the perils of wasting time (the first appearance of the sandworm, as well as a cameo by a dancing Deadpool—thankfully not revealed to actually be Ryan Reynolds, who should be issued a restraining order by awards shows). O’Brien talked about movies like he actually enjoyed watching them, enlisting Scorsese—who has even more gravitas than Adam Sandler—to put across an SNL-style fake ad for a company called “Cinemastreams,” a satirical proof of concept for the revolutionary structures known as movie theaters, underwritten, as per the fine print, by “the Sackler Family and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Beyond using Anora to prod Donald Trump’s deference to Vladimir Putin (“I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian”), O’Brien eschewed politics (which is arguably preferable than inserting them in an attempt to curry favor). The obligatorily sober references to local devastation were carefully handled, with members of L.A. Fire Department enlisted to deliver the best zingers (“All of of our hearts go out to those who have lost their homes, and I’m talking about the producers of Joker 2.”)
It turned out that the Emilia Pérez backlash was real, to the point that the various montages seemed designed to omit best actress nominee Karla Sofîia Gascón as much as possible (“There’s not a lot of Emilia Pérez in these clips,” observed my wife, Tanya). It didn’t stop “El Mal” from beating out Dianne Warren’s “The Journey,” which represented the songwriter’s sixteenth failed Oscar bid in a row (her first was for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” from 1987’s Mannequin, which, as earworms go, is closer to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”) And it didn’t prevent Zoe Saldana’s best supporting actress victory for her showy role as a cartel lawyer in the throes of a crisis of conscience—a performance that, like nearly everything else in Emilia Perez, is spirited and incoherent. But despite its record-tying 13 nominations overall, Jacques Audiard’s film lost the best international feature film Oscar to Walter Salles’s finely turned political drama I’m Still Here—a good result.
One of the enduring justifications—or, if you like, apologias—for the Oscars is that they help to draw attention to worthy movies. If, as O’Brien suggested, there were a billion people (give or take) watching last night—or at least they were until the Hulu feed cut out, right before the final awards—it’d probably make good business sense for some American (or Canadian) distributor to pick up No Other Land and put it in theaters. To paraphrase Baker’s observations about the sanctity of communal viewing, the sold-out screening I attended of the film in Toronto had its share of devastated silences, and they spoke volumes.
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