Anora’s Best Picture Win Is A Victory For Truly Independent Cinema

Throughout his speeches for his record-breaking four Oscar wins yesterday (the most amount ever awarded to one person for one film), Sean Baker thanked his team, his distributors, his cast, and his crew, and the sex-worker community, and his dog Bunsen. By the time Anora bagged Best Picture, the orchestra once more striking up Take That’s ‘Greatest Day’ (“Well this is incredible!!!!!!!” wrote Gary Barlow on an Insta story, wielding the rarely-deployed seven exclamation marks), there was barely anyone left to thank. Just as Anora is a fairy-tale story, this was a fairy-tale win for, as Baker said during his final speech, “a truly independent film” made by someone who, a decade ago, was on the verge of jacking it all in.

I first met Baker in 2015, interviewing him for his fifth feature, the transgender sex-worker comedy drama Tangerine, which tore through the screen just as its protagonists tore through Hollywood. Its heroines were hustlers, as was Baker, not that he particularly wanted to be. He’d enjoyed some relatively small-time indie success, especially with 2012’s Starlet, which explored a friendship between Dree Hemingway’s 21-year old Jane, an adult film star, and Besedka Johnson’s 85-year-old Sadie; it was a gentle and disarming film that won a couple of festival awards, but as Baker explained to me, his career felt stagnant. Tangerine, with its budget of $100,000 [from producers Jay and Mark Duplass, offering him a lifeline], was possibly his last stab and, shot as it was on iPhone 5s smartphones, a last resort. “I was trying to get financing for another film for a year and a half after Starlet, and it didn’t happen,” he told me. “So I said, ‘I’m not gonna make another film unless I act now.’”

Sean Baker used the industry’s biggest platform to take a stand.

Baker’s financial affairs were dire. “I don’t make money off of these movies at all,” he continued. “I’ve been borrowing from my parents up until I got a little hit of what [distributors] Magnolia paid for Tangerine… I’m living just until the next project pays me. I don’t have the means to do it myself. It feels sometimes like a no-win situation.” After the film was shot, Baker had felt so hopeless he “kind of lost it a little bit”, and the Duplass brothers gave him the chance to mentally recover for a few months before he went on to edit it.

Tangerine, though, did bust open the doors for Baker, getting him out of that rut: its attention and acclaim paved the way for 2017’s The Florida Project, which was distributed by A24 and found Willem Dafoe Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of a budget-motel manager navigating an unruly array of residents in the shadow of Walt Disney World. More significantly, it allowed Baker to step up – to shoot on 35mm (he is one of celluloid’s most staunch soldiers), and to further explore his investigation of the American Dream. Baker has always been scratching away at that, focusing on marginalised characters trying to get out of situations, or into situations, looking for escape, trying to build themselves better lives: his films investigate class structures and power dynamics and social climbing, for good or ill.

The Florida Project’s follow-up, Red Rocket, was quickly thrown together when another film fell apart. Thinking on his feet again, Baker shot it in late 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, with a budget of $1.1m, a 16mm Arriflex camera and a crew of ten: this is a filmmaker resolutely not looking to scale Hollywood’s hierarchy, sticking to his principles and preoccupations. Simon Rex’s Mikey Saber, a washed-out porn actor trying to get back into the industry as an agent, is a user and abuser, trampling on people’s heads (significantly – although not without ambiguity – Suzanna Son’s 17-year-old Strawberry) as he goes. He may well be cinema’s most charming scumbag. As Baker told me when I interviewed him for the Empire podcast about it, he had loved the antiheroes of Mike Leigh’s Naked and Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ‘66, and felt that such characters has been less visible of late, for fear that they are too polarising and triggering: “We are avoiding that at all costs. And I think that’s kind of sad. It’s not exactly opening us up to both the goods and the bads of life.”

Anora (budget: $6m, a relative bounty for Baker) further explores class divides, not shy of people – especially its wealthiest denizens – throwing their weight around. Without preaching or patronising, its empathetic portrayal of Ani (Mikey Madison, thoroughly deserving of her Best Actress win), her wayward beau Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), and henchman Igor (Yura Borisov) pays tribute to the disrespected and disregarded, whether they’re sex workers or cleaners. “I wanted to show how one behaves to the person just under them, on the rung right under them on the ladder of power,” Baker told me. “If you look at every single character in the entire film, they’re always punching down, except for Ani and Igor.”

These concerns have been evident throughout Baker’s career, his sensitivity always present, on screen and off. Ever since Anora won the Palme d’Or last May, through its myriad award wins and finally its steamrolling Oscar sweep, Baker has taken every opportunity to champion independent filmmaking, highlighting the “blood, sweat and tears”, as he mentioned last night, it takes to make these movies. When he won Best Director at the Film Independent Spirit Awards last week, he said that as “an indie-film lifer”, he decried a state of affairs in which the end products are simply seen as calling cards. “Some of us want to make personal films that are intended for theatrical release with subject matter that would never be greenlit by the big studios,” he said, pleading for directors, who are “creating product that creates jobs and revenues for the entire industry”, to be paid more upfront.

A few months ago in Empire, we surveyed some of the industry’s greatest filmmakers about the future of cinema. We invited them to submit answers via email, but Baker wanted to talk; he had a lot to say. “I want to say ‘hopeful’, but I’m a little distressed”, he told me when I asked what word came to mind when he considered the state of the industry. He seemed heartbroken that people were “abandoning” celluloid, filmmakers happy to go directly to streaming, or forsaking cinema for television. “It’s very frustrating for me, for somebody who’s finally broken in after all these years of trying, to see the art-form that I love starting to drift away,” he said. Last night, he used the industry’s biggest platform to take a stand.

Baker’s integrity has survived intact over the 25 years he’s been making films.

So, having finally broken in – and then some – after all those years, what next for Baker? By all accounts, more of the same. “If anything, we double-down on our indie guerilla filmmaking style,” he said in December, when asked if things might change following Anora’s success. (Despite the film’s many intricately rehearsed and choreographed sequences, it still boasts those signature Baker trademarks too – hidden cameras capturing interactions with ‘real’ people asked to sign release forms when the crew told them that they were in a movie.) Baker’s integrity has survived intact over the 25 years he’s been making films, through all the acute highs and lows. It’s taken him from the despair to glory, from the verge of giving up, to last night’s momentous, genuinely historic triumph.

“In the end, there is that sobering moment: Okay, this is the celebratory thing, the film is out there, but at the same time, this is just another step,” he told me before Tangerine’s release back in 2015. “But hopefully it’s a positive step.”

It’s always just about the next step.