At the Academy Awards earlier this month, the show continued to demonstrate that you can’t always count on a sure win. That’s what apparent Best Picture favorite Emilia Pérez appeared to be looking at three weeks ago. With 13 nominations, the most of any film, and good momentum, it seemed like the Netflix release was destined for the top statue. But while Emilia Pérez picked up two awards—Zoe Saldaña for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and “El Mal” by Clément Ducol, Camille, and Jacques Audiard for Best Original Song—the real sweep of the night went to Neon release Anora. With nominations in most of the top categories, Anora won five out of its six nominations, losing only Best Actor in a Supporting Role, which went to Kieran Culkin’s A Real Pain performance. It was a night of firsts for most of the acting categories, as Culkin, fresh off of a string of Emmy nominations and a 2023 victory for Succession, triumphed in his first nomination alongside fellow first-time nominees Mikey Madison and Zoe Saldaña.
Victories for these fresh, first-time nominees made for a string of touching acceptance speeches. Culkin told an endearing story about a rash promise his wife made him on the assumption that he would not win the Oscar. Best Live Action Short Film winner Victoria Warmerdam told her partner Trent, with whom she shared the award, “We level-headed Dutch people don’t say this often, but I love you.” And the director of Flow, the first-ever independent animated film to win the award for Best Animated Feature and the first Latvian film ever nominated for an Academy Award, gave a brief but lovely speech dreaming that his win would open doors to independent animators around the world and offering a hope that everyone would find ways to work together and overcome their differences.
Anora’s meteoric triumph is the culmination of an awards season crescendo punctuated by major victories at the Critics’ Choice Awards, the PGA Awards, and the DGA Awards. The Brooklyn-set film becomes only the fourth film ever to win both the Academy’s highest honor and the Palme d’Or (French for ‘Golden Palm’) at the Cannes film festival, which Anora earned in May of 2024. The movie joins the elite company of Billy Wilder’s 1945 noir drama The Lost Weekend, Delbert Mann’s 1955 romance Marty, and Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 hit Parasite.
The film’s success, in the wake of awards triumphs by films like Poor Things and Oppenheimer in recent years, has garnered online criticism from younger moviegoers who are distressed by the prevalence of sexual content in recent popular and critically acclaimed movies. Anora follows a dancer at a strip club who marries a rich young client on a whim. Much of the discourse about the film is inspired by a December 2024 report that Anora’s lead actress Mikey Madison declined to have an intimacy coordinator on set during the filming of explicit scenes, breaking with an industry practice that was popularized in the late 2010s. Anora’s victory raises important questions for Hollywood—is the performer’s individual comfort the only thing that matters? Or do we need safeguards that protect people not only from external exploitation, but from their own naivety? Surrounding all of this is a growing discomfort that many young people have with the high degrees of sexual content in popular media, leading some in Generation Z to shun all nudity or explicit content as unnecessary and exploitative. It is our role as young people to decide which values will guide the art we create and the entertainment we consume.