The independent film “Anora” won big at last night’s Oscars. The small-budget movie about an exotic dancer who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch, and then loses track of him on a wild night in Brighton Beach, took home five statues.
Iconoclastic director Sean Baker, who also wrote and edited the film, was basically the star of the show.
Mark Moorhead, a film critic at Phoenix Magazine, joined The Show to break down the significance of Anora’s triumph.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Mark, well, good morning. It's wonderful to talk to you about the Sean Baker show — I mean the Oscars.
MARK MOORHEAD: Yeah, no kidding. That’s about right.
DINGMAN: How? What did you make of the big night for "Anora"? That seems like an obvious place to start.
MOORHEAD: Sure, and it was a very big night. I gotta tell you, I didn't think "Anora" was the best picture of the year. I thought it was pretty good.
DINGMAN: What were the movies that you know — if it was the Mark Morehead Oscars — who would you have liked it?
MOORHEAD: Yeah, that would have been a pretty low rating, I'm afraid. But the big thing that I wanted out of last night, I did get, and that was my favorite movie of the year, which was "Flow," the Latvian animated movie about the little kitty. No movie this year moved me as much as that, or amused me as much as that, or was as beautiful to me, I thought, as that.
And it did win. It was nominated in two categories and one for Best Animated Feature. And so I was good as far as that went.
But "Anora" really wandered around, I thought, in the second half. And really kind of, it became as tedious as an actual night where you're out looking for somebody that you can't find. You know, in my opinion, not necessarily unrealistically, just not in a way that I thought was particularly edifying. So I think there's a lot of talent in that movie, including Sean Baker.
DINGMAN: It's interesting that you mentioned, you know, the talent of Sean Baker in terms of what to call out about that movie, because I'd love to get your take on this. I was trying to remember another Oscar night where it felt not just so dominated by one movie, but by one particular person's artistic perspective.
MOORHEAD: The one that leaps to mind, it was one of the most boring Oscar shows in recent memory that I can recall was the one where one of the "Lord of the Rings" pictures.
DINGMAN: OK.
MOORHEAD: Claimed a whole bunch of them. And you certainly could link that to one person, Peter Jackson.
DINGMAN: Right.
MOORHEAD: An absolute bona fide genius. But it was not an interesting show, as far as that went. Even if you argued, as some might, that the movie deserved it, it just wasn't good TV.
DINGMAN: And it also seems to me, you know, like we get together to watch the Oscars every year, we anticipate the Oscars, you know, think about who the host is going to be, because we're kind of anticipating, wanting to have something to make fun of.
MOORHEAD: Of course.
DINGMAN: And it sort of seems like a false hope that it's going to be a quote unquote “good show.”
MOORHEAD: Of course, and I don't think a good show is actually what people want. I have long believed that part of what we love about the Oscars, because they usually are atrociously over long. The best joke last night was Conan O'Brien saying, "if you're still enjoying the show, it's what we call Stockholm Syndrome."
But I don't think it's what we want. I think we want it to be lame and bloated and a weird throwback to an old school form of TV variety show. And one of the things that we enjoy about griping about it is that it doesn't the show doesn't give us that feel that it gave us when we were kids, that excitement and that that glamor and that thrill it just seems tired now and that's what we're when we're griping about that. I think we're griping a little bit about our lost youth.
DINGMAN: Right. Well, that makes me think about one of the big things people seem to be talking about with this year's Oscars. I'd be curious to get your take on, is this idea that we have gotten so far from the time when movies were monoculture, and that by and large, with the films that were nominated this year and the films that won- "Flow" and "Anora" being two examples of this — these are movies that, broadly speaking, not that many people saw.
A lot of people probably found out about for the first time, watching the broadcast last night, and that I saw, I believe it was Wesley Morris this morning, said last year, during the whole Barbenheimer phenomenon, it was less that those movies watered the desert and more that they were a mirage, and that this year was kind of a truer reflection of where we are.
MOORHEAD: I mean, they're they, the ones that had great success were kind of outsider movies. And the whole way there was that sort of plaintive begging for people to go back to the theater that was included in the show last night. It was quite funny. Uh, Conan’s bit about like a streaming service, where you actually go to a building and see a movie on the screen on 800 I think exactly you know, that was very clever.
But I don't think I mean, there was that assertion that we all fell in love with movies at the theater. I certainly did. Maybe you did too.
DINGMAN: Absolutely.
MOORHEAD: It's very true for many people, but I don't think it's true for everybody. I think even not necessarily just talking about young people, but even somewhat older people fell in love with movies thanks to the VHS tape, thanks to the VCR.
DINGMAN: Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting that you know, I mean, if you think about people who were sort of coming of age as consumers, like the kinds of people who would have their own Netflix account right around the time it converted to streaming and all these other cord cutting services came along. It's not Gen Z. It's not so much the phone generation that we tend to ascribe that to culturally, it's more folks like you're saying, like the blockbuster generation, people who rented tapes.
MOORHEAD: And believe me, I agree with the whole pair of Cinema Paradiso communal experience thing. It's definitely for me, but it is decreasingly the same for everybody, I think.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, you know, we alluded to earlier. Baker in winning Best Original Screenplay, Best Directing, Best Editing and I guess in taking Best Picture, he has really put his artistic stamp on the Oscars this year, and it would seem to put him in a position to be kind of a standard bearer. What do you think the implications of that are?
MOORHEAD: There aren't any implications, necessarily none that are for sure, he may go on to have a fantastic career, but if you look at best pictures over the years, it's very, very common for them not to be the movies that we remember. Now. I think this guy will get a lot of interest because, you know, he won best picture with a $6 million movie. Yeah, and people are going to pay attention to that.
DINGMAN: A lot of times, I think directors in his position who run the table the way he did, and to your point, do so on such a shoestring budget, are then invited to take the wheel of really big ticket movies.
MOORHEAD: I think, yeah, if you, if you get your chance to be promoted from you know, lieutenant to brigadier general of some, you know, whole massive division, then I think you probably take it.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, and I know there's a lot of people who are big fans of these smaller indie directors who get concerned about them selling out when they take on these big movies. But if we look at these examples. I mean, Gerwig with "Barbie."
MOORHEAD: She went very big budget, but it was, nobody's going to suggest that that was some sell out exactly by the numbers of the movie. It was this very imaginative piece of work. So, you know, she brought that to big budget filmmaking, and that's when something gets really interesting.
