It is sometimes only a pleasantry when the winner of a major award says they “are so surprised to be here” while accepting the accolade. Yet that sentiment from Sean Baker seemed genuine Friday night when he accepted the Best Picture prize at the 30th annual Critics Choice Awards. Consider that just moments beforehand, his deceptively layered screwball comedy about a sex worker from Brooklyn, Anora, had been largely shut out by the critics.
Up until this moment, Anora failed to pick up the CCAs’ Best Director award, nor did it get Best Actress for Mikey Madison. Even the one category Anora was viewed as the frontrunner in, Best Original Screenplay, instead went to Coralie Fargeat for The Substance. So Anora triumphing for the biggest trophy of the night was a shock to Baker and plenty of others—including perhaps viewers at home who’d taken The Brutalist versus Emilia Pérez narrative to heart after both films were dubbed “Best Picture” in differing genres during the Golden Globes last month, and the latter became the most nominated film at this year’s Academy Awards.
Yet unlike the CCAs also curiously giving Best Director to Jon M. Chu for Wicked, Anora’s Best Picture win does not look like a one-off or a fluke. In fact, it is quickly taking on the shape of a turning point in momentum that could carry the quirky, R-rated character study all the way to the Academy’s final winner’s circle on Oscar night. Indeed, by the time the weekend ended, Anora was essentially dubbed “best picture” by three different bellwether organizations. By virtue of being televised, the CCAs were probably the most visible, but the most consequential came Saturday night when both the Directors Guild of America and the Producer Guild of America also gave their top cinematic prizes to the Neon-released film.
With Baker earning the DGAs’ Best Director prize and the PGAs’ David O. Selznick Achievement award going to the whole Anora team, a plausible consensus appears to be coalescing around Anora in the industry as a potential Best Picture winner, particularly because unlike the CCAs or last month’s Golden Globes, members of the directors and producers guilds are also in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In other words, these are awards guilds who help shape the narrative that often culminates in Oscar wins. Consider that of the previous 15 years of PGA/Selznick achievement winners, only three did not go on to take home Best Picture come Oscar night: 1917, which lost to Parasite, La La Land, which lost to Moonlight, and The Big Short, which lost to Spotlight.
The PGAs remain the best bellwether for predicting Oscars’ Best Picture winners, and the fact that a majority of the members in the DGA seems to agree with their consensus gives an extraordinary amount of momentum to a comedy that had fallen off a lot of prognosticators’ radar after the film was entirely ignored at the Golden Globes. (It also probably didn’t help that the Globes remained the only major Los Angeles-based awards ceremony to announce its winners for over a month due to the LA fires disaster delaying all other organizations.)
The takeaway from this newfound frontrunner status around Anora is sure to raise plenty of eyebrows. Both The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez have earned their fair share of negative press over the last month: the Brady Corbet American immigrant epic has become controversial in some circles after it was learned AI was used to enhance accent pronunciations in scenes where English-speaking actors were performing in Hungarian. Meanwhile the fallout from revelations about old tweets shared by Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón has already gone down as one of the greatest awards campaign stumbles in Oscar history.
Perhaps that influenced Anora’s new emergence as a frontrunner, but then again perhaps not. Full disclosure: as a member of the Critics Choice Association, I can attest that voting closed in early January, well before either media narrative about “controversy” with The Brutalist or Emilia Pérez emerged. Anora is simply a very original comedy with vibrant performances and writing that might benefit from the preferential ballot voting system used by both the CCAs and Oscars for the top prize (i.e. it could be a lot of folks’ second or third choice unlike other more polarizing films).
Plus, well before this past weekend, Anora won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year, the first for an American film in more than a decade. It’s a film with a subtle but lacerating satirical edge about class and exploitative gender dynamics, and is clearly delivered in a way appealing to European and international cineaste sensibilities. And the Academy has taken on a lot of new international members in the last decade.
Anora has always had qualities that made it seem like a plausible consensus pick, and after this weekend that is becoming self-evident. But we’ll learn more after the Screen Actors Guild has their say on Feb. 23—and of course the Academy on March 2.
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