Oscars 2025: ‘Anora’ wins five awards; ‘The Brutalist’ gets 3
The most nominated film for the 97th Academy Awards won fewer Oscars than the most awarded film this time
Anora, a film written and directed by Sean Baker won five awards, including Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay at the 97th Academy Awards held on March 3. Comedian Conan O’Brien who made his debut as host of the show, made it a point to talk about viewers from around the world and even spoke a few words in Hindi-Urdu (inflection points are tough, so we forgive you, Conan) referencing its live telecast from Hollywood, Los Angeles in the wee hours of the morning in India.
Baker is a seasoned director, and also an experimental one. He should have won big at the Oscars ten years ago, when his 2015 film Tangerine, shot only on an iPhone swept the film festival circuit. The feature-length slice-of-life followed two transgender women, both sex-workers, as they went about their day taking discrimination and heartbreak on the chin and delivering nothing short of searing performances. The film wasn’t even nominated then.
Anora, which won big on Monday, follows the eponymous protagonist, a stripper and escort played by Mickey Madison (who won Best Actress), and her uber-rich and ultra-young-looking client, the son of a Russian magnate, played by actor Mark Eydelshteyn as they spend a week together at his mansion in south Brooklyn, New York. The comedy has cinematic long takes, rests on superb performances by all cast members, including actors playing Russians toughs sent to rough up the young couple, and a tight script when the frenzy hits mid-way. Anora’s big win should have been predicted.
It wasn’t, because Emilia Peréz caught everyone’s attention. The Spanish-language musical starred transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón who plays a Mexican cartel boss who transitions into a woman. The film, directed by Frenchman Jacques Audiard, earned Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz a combined best actress award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. The film was nominated for 13 awards on Monday, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, won only two — Saldaña won the award for the Best Supporting Actress and the film also won an Oscar for the Best Original Song for ‘El Mal’.
Netflix won the streaming rights and launched an extravagant Oscar campaign, but with barely months to go for the Oscars, the film ran into controversy after Gascón’s tweets from previous years, referring to the 2021 Oscar ceremony, George Floyd and Islam, were slammed for bigotry. While the director and Netflix distanced themselves from Gascón following the controversy — fuelled further by her comments defending herself whilst also apologising for hurting people’s sentiments — many felt that it had negatively impacted the film’s Oscar chances. However, the film itself wasn’t received well in Mexico, where many felt that it glamorized drug cartels that are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. Prominent Mexican commentators and journalists also wrote in national papers about the film as trivialising the violence. In the press room after the ceremony, Saldaña apologised after a journalist told her that the film was really hurtful “for us Mexicans”. “I’m very, very sorry that you and so many Mexicans felt offended. That was never our intention. We spoke from a place of love,” The Guardian reported the Dominican Republic-origin actor as saying.
Though Saldaña’s win was uncertain on account of the controversies, Kieran Culkin — who won Best Supporting Actor for his role in A Real Pain — was a clear favourite after he won all the other awards in the season, including the Bafta, the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild. The 42-year-old actor, brother to Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin, wore his success lightly during his acceptance speech (he took the opportunity to remind his wife of her promise to have another child with him if he won), but he has been awarded for previous performances too. This, however, was his first Oscar.
Adrian Brody won his second Best Actor Oscar for The Brutalist, a film about a fictional Hungarian architect who migrates to the United States of America after surviving the Holocaust and feeds off the zeitgeist of the times to develop the Brutalist school of architecture. Laurie Crawley, who offers gorgeous 70mm cinematography in the three-and-a-half-hour running time, won the film Best Cinematography. Brody’s speech was moving, and he was, characteristically, sentimental and apolitical.
To be fair, politics remained largely out of focus at the Oscars. While it could be said that Brutalist, with its focus on the American Dream and the significance of migration, references the political turmoil that faces Americans today, actual comments were far and few in between. Saldana made it a point to call herself a “proud child of immigrant parents”, and The Apprentice, a film about US President Donald Trump was snubbed in the categories it was nominated in, including Best Actor. No Other Land, a documentary feature about the Israeli demolitions of Palestinian property in southern West Bank won an Oscar and Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist and one of the filmmakers, called “on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people” during his acceptance speech. Peter Straughan, writer of Conclave, which received eight nominations including for Best Picture, showed his support for Ukraine with a Ukrainian flag pin accent on his tuxedo. This act comes close on the heels of the televised argument between the American president, Vice-President JD Vance and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on February 28.
The host, O’Brien, only referenced the contentious conversation — where the American president spoke of how much he and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, have gone through together — with a joke. “Anora is having a good night,” he said. “I guess Americans are finally excited to see someone stand up to a powerful Russian,” O’Brien said.
