Why Anora Deserved To Win Best Picture

I ranked Anora at the top of my list for the best films of 2024, but I did not expect it to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It was winning most of its nominations during the ceremony, but I tried not to get my hopes up. I thought the top contenders for the big prize were either The Brutalist, a historical epic that I also loved, or Emelia Perez, a messy musical about the transgender experience that would appeal to aged neoliberals and come off offensively misfiring for the left. There was even the old sign that Anora wouldn’t win Best Picture when it won Best Director (though this theory has been disproven over the past few years).

The Hulu stream stopped as the ceremony drew to its final categories of Best Actress and Best Picture, dropping at the worst possible moment. Frantic, I scrambled to Bluesky and kept smashing refresh to see who won the final categories. Anora won both. I held my enthusiasm when the news dropped. I didn’t want to react too soon in case there was another La La Land/Moonlight situation. But there wasn’t. Anora won Best Picture, and I was delightfully surprised amid a night of other exciting surprises, like Flow winning Best Animated Picture and The Substance winning Best Makeup.

My favoring of Anora goes beyond it being a well-made picture by Sean Baker, although I can’t stress enough how much I love the way the film was shot. I watched the film roughly a month after the Presidential election, still holding onto feelings of fear, anger, and uncertainty. Baker’s films usually have these elements of presenting down-on-their-luck characters biting back hard at an unfair world. But Anora was far more topically poignant for how well it reflected that hellish year and a yearning to voice that rage. As Oscar host Conan O’Brien accurately described the film, “I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian.”

For roughly the first half of the film, things seem to be working out for the protagonist, Annie. She goes from barely making enough money to live while working as a stripper to landing a young, rich Russian guy, Vanya, for marriage. They get married in Las Vegas and it looks like her life is now on easy street, living it up in Vanya’s lavish estate with plenty of partying and sex. It’s paradise and Annie relishes in how far she’s come.

Then, she falls, not from any fault of her own, but due to the whims of Vanya’s scrutinizing and greedy family. Annie is not sat down for a talk with the powerful Russian family to annul the marriage. She’s forced to by goons working for the family. Annie is furious and when the estate is raided and she’s attacked, she fights back. Hard. She kicks, bites, throws blunt objects, and screams as loud as she can. When she’s outnumbered, and her husband has run off, she’s forced by the goons to track down her husband and get the marriage annulled.

Saying that Annie reluctantly goes along with the goons on this quest would an understatement. Annie might not be able to fight back against henchmen wielding weapons and grabbing her, but she does have an acid tongue and a vicious laugh for the stupidity of the people trying to control her life. She knows that even though the Russians might get what they want in the end, but only after growing frustrated and angry at how awful they are at their jobs. Annie doesn’t give them an ounce of pity. The only Russian who is nice to her in all of this is the gentler goon Igor, but Annie refuses to allow any relationship to materialize between them. Every display of compassion that Igor displays is met with another spit in his face. If Igor really wanted a relationship, he wouldn’t have gone along with rich dickheads who ruined her life. Even by the end of the film, when Annie has lost her husband and fortune, her relent towards Igor after losing everything is bitter. We go the whole movie watching Annie as this angry, gnashing woman who knew how to get what she wanted and called out privileged dickheads to their faces. By the end, she’s exhausted and vulnerable. It’s a gutpunch of an ending after so many scenes of comedic chaos and passionate vice.

The film feels like the perfect encapsulation of last year. There was some hope that we wouldn’t be under threat of Donald Trump’s hideous right-wing reign once more with the presence of Harris and Walz taking over the nomination from Biden. We might’ve been able to avoid Trump’s stripping of rights and bowing to Putin with Biden’s VP promising better and a Minnesota governor speaking more like a human being than a politician. Then the bomb dropped and Trump won. After being warned of the ghoulish outline in Project 2025, we readied ourselves for the worst. Tarrifs that would raise prices, abortion rights removed, education gutted, the LGBTQ community having their rights rolled back, and greater abundance of bigotry was going to fill the air. Life was going to get worse for everybody. Like Annie, we were tossed back to the life we wanted to escape from rich assholes who don’t give a fuck about us.

Everybody should be able to identify with Annie, especially if you voted for Trump. If you’re a Trump voter, you were told everything would be better if you voted for him. If you accepted his offer, life would be easy, in the same way Vanya proposed to Annie. But Vanya was a liar. He said he would devote his love to Annie, but he immediately bailed when Russian goons came knocking. The inept and greedy goons have come for you now and have forced you to admit the one thing you didn’t want to believe: Trump never cared about you. He was never the strong man you wanted him to be on trade, diplomacy, or your fictitous war on woke. He was an immature brat who would throw you under the bus if it meant one more day of freedom from any responsibility.

Now is the time to be angry. Now is the time to be like Annie and become the loud and annoying voice in the ears of the scum who think they can walk all over you. While Annie still ends up with only a few thousand dollars by the end, she bites and laughs the whole way through. The Russians might’ve got what they wanted, but they still look like incompetent shitheads by the time Annie departs, where the family might have all their money but none of the trust, where Vanya’s mother may bluster, but Vanya’s father will laugh at Annie, ‘s vicious verbal jabs.

Anora just had everything to be such a perfect movie and a reflection of our current hellscape. The energy was high, the script was twisty, and the way Baker shoots New York City with 35mm cameras is so astounding that it almost makes the city look like it did in the 1970s. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions, where Annie’s insults bring laughs while her final tears evoke personal waterworks. For a scenario that feels like it could take place 20 years ago, it’s sure to age gracefully, beyond being reflective of our current times. But in this moment, Anora is the perfect movie for a time where we should feel angry, vicious, and exhausted at a world where it feels like rich assholes are taking control of our lives. Anora is a film that is alive with all that fury, which is why it was my favorite film of last year and the most deserving of the Academy Award for Best Picture.