Anora emerged triumphant from last week’s Academy Awards presentation, winning five Oscars including best actress for Mikey Madison for her performance as Ani, a sex worker who elopes with the feckless son of a Russian oligarch, only to find herself at odds with his powerful family and their henchmen. As in his previous films, writer-director Sean Baker shows generosity and affection for the marginalised characters, and especially for its heroine. Even when she gets roughed up, it’s played for laughs and you’re confident she won’t meet one of the sad fates of screen sex workers of yore, such as Louise Brooks as Lulu, stabbed to death in Pandora’s Box, or Vivien Leigh as Myra, who throws herself under a lorry in Waterloo Road.

Madison said in her acceptance speech, “I also just want to again recognise and honour the sex worker community. I will continue to support and be an ally.” However, members of the East London Strippers Collective weren’t impressed by Anora. “We didn’t see any of, like, who she really is as a person,” said Maddie, who went on to admit it was a step in the right direction. “But if they had gone just a little bit further and said: ‘We need full decriminalisation now,’ that could have actually had a much bigger impact.”

But if you want to see more about sex workers’ lives on screen you have only to check out the history of the Academy Awards, first given out in 1929. The original best actress award went to Janet Gaynor for her performance as the “street angel” in Street Angel, with Gloria Swanson nominated the same year for playing a “fallen woman” in Sadie Thompson. In the 97 years of the Oscars’ existence, best actress or best supporting actress awards have gone to actors playing sex workers 16 times, from Elizabeth Taylor in BUtterfield 8 to Jane Fonda in Klute, to last year’s winner Emma Stone, who has a jolly old time working in a Parisian brothel in Poor Things. And that’s not even counting the nominations for, say, Greta Garbo in Camille, Shirley MacLaine in Irma la Douce or Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs Miller.

I haven’t totted up how many times women have been nominated for performances as, for example, architects or witches, but looking at the statistics, it’s clear that Hollywood has for decades acknowledged sex work as a viable career. Or just as viable as being a hitman, another of those “exotic” jobs its film-makers keep returning to. There are some films about sex workers’ lives that could be described as social-realist – Lukas Moodysson’s heartbreaking Lilya 4-Ever from 2002 springs to mind, as does Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles, which topped Sight and Sound magazine’s 2022 critics’ poll of the greatest films ever made.

But such unflinching depictions are a long way from mainstream Hollywood, which prefers its sex workers portrayed as fairytale princesses who have fallen on hard times, exemplified by Pretty Woman, for which Julia Roberts, of course, was Oscar-nominated. It’s an aspirational blueprint: sell yourself on Hollywood Boulevard and you too can snag a millionaire. Having excised the dark elements and downbeat ending of its original script, Pretty Woman has been described as a modern-day Cinderella story. Anora, in turn, has been called the anti-Pretty Woman – though it still manages to be shiny and upbeat, with Ani showing the sort of smiling-through-tears resilience exhibited by Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas.

Why is the Academy so fond of sex worker performances anyway? Is it that they are considered courageous in a world that still looks down its nose at the oldest profession while pretending not to? Or are some male film-makers so unfamiliar with women from other walks of life that their most deeply considered female characters, when they bother to include any, tend to be on the game? Sex workers, mostly female but sometimes male as well, were a recurring feature of the New Hollywood in the 1970s, when the Hays Code had given way to so-called sexual liberation, and every movie brat except Steven Spielberg inserted at least one prostitute into their films.

“It’s male projections of the kind of women they think they’d like. And for actresses it’s a juicy role, a stretch, a chance to be bad and desirable and rebellious,” film critic Molly Haskell said in the New York Times in 1996, the year of nominations for Shue in Leaving Las Vegas, Sharon Stone playing a former sex worker in Casino, and Mira Sorvino, who won best supporting actress for her performance as a dim-witted sex worker in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite. The rollcall of actors who have seized that chance is extensive, from Jodie Foster (Taxi Driver) and Kim Basinger (LA Confidential) to Charlize Theron (Monster), Anne Hathaway (Les Misérables) and Naomie Harris (Moonlight).

Sam, another member of the East London Stripper’s Collective, says that, with more people entering sex work these days for economic reasons, “we are already in a culture where I think we are quite destigmatised.” Indeed, as the economy becomes ever more precarious, perhaps sex work will soon be seen as a career more viable than, say, journalism. Kudos to the Academy Awards for showing us the way.