Oscars 2025: long day's journey into 'Anora'

Amid these troubling times, can we not all live in the world of the 2025 Oscars' runaway success story, an ever-smiling Sean Baker? That thought increasingly crossed my mind as the 97th Academy Awards crawled towards its close, a promise early on from host Conan O'Brien not to "waste time" abandoned more or less as soon as it had been spoken.

But even as one wondered about a peculiarly timed James Bond tribute – in far from cheering news, the rights to 007 were recently purchased by Amazon – or any number of lame comedy sequences (a poorly dressed Adam Sandler fleeing the auditorium), the writer-director of the flinty, quietly maverick Anora would take once again to the stage, and suddenly the world seemed a nicer place to be. Baker's four Oscars, as writer, director, editor, and producer of the comparatively little-seen indie film, were rivaled by none other than Walt Disney back in the day, this time for a film about an American sex worker's wild ride after she marries a wealthy Russian client - all light years removed from the realm of Disney.  Baker's  geniality – sweetness, even – informed the most nail-biting race of the night, best actress. In the end, Anora herself prevailed, which is to say that 25-year-old Mikey Madison (main picture) took the prize, besting competition from Demi Moore's fearless, career-capping performance in The Substance and Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres (pictured above), from I'm Still Here, whose own mother, Fernanda Montenegro, lost her separate bid in this category 26 years ago to Gwyneth Paltrow for Shakespeare in Love.

Madison's shoutout to the mighty array of nominees in her category seemed as engagingly heartfelt as one could wish for, and the collective jubilation throughout the evening from the Anora brigade placed the more sober-sided aspects of the ceremony in bolder relief. It said something of the headwind of good will that Baker's win for director – following his prizes for editing and original screenplay – prompted fellow nominee Brady Corbet of The Brutalist, Baker's closest competition, to leap immediately to his feet: instant support for a comparably iconoclastic colleague.

In fact, The Brutalist garnered three prizes, starting with Adrien Brody's second Oscar across as many nominations, once again playing a Holocaust survivor as he had 22 years ago for The Pianist. As moved now as he was then, the actor wasn't as focused this time in his remarks and rambled his way to a wrap-up that saw him shushing the attempted play-out of the orchestra, reminding listeners he had been here before. Cinematographer Lol Crowley, a first-time nominee and winner for the same film, hugged so many people on the way to the podium that one wondered when he might ever get there.The prizes for supporting performers landed as expected, both of them arguably co-leads in their respective films, and one can think of previous best actress winners – Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook, Louise Fletcher in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - who felt as if they had less screen time than this evening's tearful supporting actress recipient, Zoe Saldaña, from Emilia Perez. Similarly, few would deny Kieran Culkin (pictured above, with co-star Jesse Eisenberg) the acclaim he has been gathering now for months for his emotionally poleaxing performance in A Real Pain – that final scene! – but surely his category's reigning supporting performance was the wonderful Yura Borisov, from, yes, Anora. (And it was lovely to note Culkin's unbridled enthusiasm as Madison took to the stage for her trophy, the second to last of the evening.) 

What about more pressing real world issues like, well, the real world? That was very much in evidence, and not just because The Apprentice, telling of the young Donald Trump, garnered two key acting nods. It's true that the 47th president was never once mentioned directly by name, but his presence was felt throughout - very explicitly so during Brody's speech where the onscreen image of Sebastian Stan's Trump was in view behind him. O'Brien landed a joke late on about Anora's building momentum – "Two wins already. I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian" – and multiple winners referenced the divisive politics of the day, though presenter Daryl Hannah was the only one to preface her remarks with the exhortation, "Slava Ukraine!" 

The fires that have ravaged greater Los Angeles area and beyond cued an opening sequence of iconic movie moments from that very city, and LA firefighters took to the Dolby Theatre stage to rapturous applause, even delivering a few comic zingers prepared for them which, to be honest, didn't merit the elaborate set-up. (Is Joker 2 that funny a punchline?) Heartening in a different way were the multiple firsts in evidence, starting with Wicked's Paul Tazewell as the first Black recipient of the prize for costumes. (That's interesting if one sets the Oscars against, say, Broadway's Tonys, where Tazewell won the same prize for Hamilton almost a decade ago.)

The much-admired wordless film Flow, nominated in two categories, emerged victorious in animation, thereby giving Latvia its first-ever Oscar, just as the eventual winner for international feature, I'm Still Here, represented Brazil's first win in that category. France was well-represented by two of the five directing nominees, Coralie Fargeat and Jacques Audiard, and Audiard's Emilia Perez, beset by controversy along the way, did result in the Best Song prize for "El Mal". That in turn led to its exultant songwriters, Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais, raising their voices in impromptu song from the podium, until they were successfully played out in a way that Brody wasn't later on. 

And all eyes were very much on the documentary feature prize, which saw films themed to Ukraine (Porcelain War, a tribute to art in the face of savagery) and Gaza (No Other Land, about the Israeli razing of a Palestinian village). A Palestinian-Israeli collaboration that went into the ceremony without an American distributor, the latter film took the prize. What followed were separately impassioned speeches from filmmakers Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham – one Palestinian, the other Israeli – calling attention to inequality whereby, said Abraham, "I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws, that destroy lives, that he cannot control.”

And surprise was nowhere more evident than in the animated short film category, where the Iranian co-directors Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani said their plane had landed only three hours before into LA, and there they were holding Oscars. The cause for their delay, unsurprisingly alas, was visa issues. "It's a miracle," said Molayemi, who needed two attempts to get through his speech in the excitement of the moment. And amid a ceremony that saw a film made for a minuscule $6 million walk away with five awards, indeed it was.

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