'Anora' and the Academy Awards: The Naughty Best Picture Nominee That Could

March 3, 2025

Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in "Anora" (image via Neon)

Sean Baker's Anora won Oscar gold. Considered a long-shot at the start of the awards season, it benefited from the controversy surrounding Emilia Pérez, the frontrunner after winning the Golden Globes' Best Motion Picture award in January and receiving 13 Academy Awards nominations.

Racist and anti-Semitic tweets by lead actress Karla Sofía Gascón from several years ago, which recently resurfaced, prompted Netflix, director Jacques Auriard and cast members like Zoe Saldaña to distance themselves from Gascón. So much for the fantastical cartel musical.

Those following Baker's career as an indie auteur could see his rise coming. His last four films - Anora, Red Rocket (2021), The Florida Project (2017) and Tangerine (2015) - have offered a steady drumbeat of compelling stories, often with women as the main protaganists.

Like Sin-Dee in Tangerine, Ani (Mikey Madison) in Anora (the title is her actual fictional name) is a prostitute/escort who works at a gentlemen's club The HQ in New York. Ani appears to like her job that involves lap dances and having sex with male customers. She hits it off with a young Russian guy Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) who's rich. After a few whirlwind dates, they elope and get hitched in Las Vegas.

Ani knows little about Vanya's background. He's in the States living in his family's mansion and partying like it's 1999. They smoke from a mini-glass bong after sex and snort coke and drink in clubs. When word gets back to Vanya's parents that he's married a "hooker," all hell breaks loose.

The second act is less fun. Vanya sneaks away, leaving Ani to deal with three cutthroat Armenians who work for the family. She's basically abducted as they go on a wild tour of New York looking for Vanya that finds them in Coney Island and then back at the HQ where he's drunk.

They all arrive in Las Vegas for a quickie annulment and Ani agrees to a $10,000 cash payment. But there is one plot shift that changes the story entirely by the end.

Anora was not your typical Oscar bait. Ani's nude in the early sex scenes and she swears like a sailor in the middle and later parts as she's being dragged around by the Armenian tough guys. But it is Madison's movie and she carries it well, to the point of deserving the Best Actress Oscar over the embattled Gascón and Demi Moore (for The Substance).

Emilia Pérez's downfall opened the door for Anora to walk away with Best Picture honors on March 2. It was a good break for Baker, Madison and Anora, which also took the awards for Actress, Dirtecting and Original Screenplay. We'll never know what might have happened had Gascón's tweets not been discovered.

With three awards – Actor, Cinematogprahy and Score –The Brutalist proved formidible. Emilia Pérez still earned two awards, Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldaña and Song. So did Dune: Part Two (Sound and Visual Effects). A Real Pain's Kieran Culkin was named Supporting Actor, but A Complete Unknown was shut out.