So, as Conan O’Brien pointed out, the Oscars went to a film about someone standing up to a Russian, and maybe recent events mean we have to probe its political metaphor even further. Sean Baker’s cacophonous, crazy non-love story Anora won five Academy Awards including best actress for that rather amazing and newly born star Mikey Madison, playing the tough, smart, beautiful New York lap dancer who gets a Vegas quickie marriage to the spoilt and pusillanimous son of a Russian oligarch and then has to stand up to his parents. Madison embodies Anora’s complex courage: not exactly romantic, not exactly in love, but certainly believing in the wedding contract, in her own status as a legally married woman and in the possibility of happiness which is no more remote for her than for anyone else. She is the thoroughly modern, thoroughly 21st-century version of Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, who thinks that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty. She is in an all-against-one contest against toxic masculinity, and her final scene is rather extraordinary: reclaiming the dignity and honesty of what she is doing for a living, against the bullying and bad faith of all the men in her life.
And yes, it is about an American who is wooed by a Russian, in whom she pathetically reposes her trust but who ultimately betrays her. Teasing out who is Trump and who is Putin in this scenario isn’t easy. Maybe Anora is the American Maga voter and her pampered and impetuous bridegroom is the Russified and compromised US president, a Trumputin who makes promises but is then himself brutally brought to heel by his owner. It’s an amazing win for this exhilarating and scintillating film, and what a career arc for the American indie auteur Baker.
Elsewhere, Adrien Brody won his second Oscar for his wrenchingly committed performance as the mysterious, fictional Holocaust survivor and architect in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, confronting his mysterious destiny – a movie I had been tipping to do better, but it did score another deserved Oscar for Lol Crawley’s superb cinematography. Kieran Culkin won the night’s most extensively predicted Oscar for best supporting actor, as the inner-woundedly twitchy guy who goes on a Holocaust tour of his grandparents’ Polish homeland in Jesse Eisenberg’s brilliant comedy A Real Pain. That also was a thoroughly deserving winner, in a category of great performances.
The vote for the much-debated contender Emilia Pérez did not in fact collapse as utterly as many thought it would: the amusing, preposterous and shallow telenovela-style musical about a Mexican cartel boss who transitions to a woman got best supporting actress for the estimable Zoe Saldaña, whose sincerity and force were marooned in a sea of entertainingly ridiculous nonsense. Best original song, too. Time will tell if this film, from that formidable French auteur Jacques Audiard, will be regarded as equal to his other work.
It lost the best international feature Oscar to I’m Still Here, with its subtle, complex and deeply humane lead performance from Fernanda Torres. This is the true story of a woman who stood up to the military dictatorship when her husband was arrested without charge in 1971. It is a movie about which I was faintly agnostic, but Torres’s performance has such finely grained intelligence.
So often, the Oscars play out with obtuse made-up stories while the real world is happening elsewhere, but not these Oscars. Anora is about violence and power – although perhaps I should eat a slice of humble pie and concede the importance and relevance of Ali Abbasi’s film The Apprentice, about the early, squalid years of Donald Trump, which I thought at first was too glib but which was perhaps unfairly overlooked on the night. The documentary Oscar deservedly went to the Israeli-Palestinian-authored No Other Land about Palestinian villages whose occupants were in 2022 ordered to leave.
A distinctive and satisfying set of Oscars, then – and what a triumph for Madison and Baker.
Read more about the 2025 Oscars:
How Anora swept the Oscars – and the complete list of winners
The red carpet and Oscars ceremony – in pictures
