Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.
The night of the Oscars, I frantically texted my friends about the award winners, praying that Anora wouldn’t win big.
After I saw Anora had run the gauntlet on Best Film Editing, Best Original Screenplay and Best Directing, I had the sinking feeling it would win Best Picture. When it did, I could feel the extreme disappointment seeping into every word I said.
While I have thoughts on the Academy Awards themselves, that can be set aside in the face of this: I truly, genuinely, do not think Anora should have won Best Picture because of the way the male gaze permeates every corner of the film.
I entered the movie hoping for an authentic, sensitive portrayal of sex work, and came out with a try-hard Cinderella-esque story that glorified the dangers of the profession. In a nutshell, as a woman of color watching it, I felt the male gaze so heavily on everything Mikey Madison put out on screen.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Madison made the movie what it is. She was amazing — and with the script she had, I am so happy she won Best Actress. The film, on the other hand, was a masterclass in what not to do when you’re trying to portray minority communities.
Anora’s plot romanticizes the bad things that happened to Ani, the protagonist, and simply has to bring in a man to save her. After she experiences assault, violent tirades against her character and essentially a coerced marriage, she is still pushed to look for love. It felt, to be frank, like a male fantasy of Cinderella if she was a sex worker from Brooklyn.
There is a way to do the Cinderella story right, but Anora isn’t that. While the film’s ending has been described in multiple ways, it felt like a way to make everything that happened to Ani her fault, further playing into the male gaze.
Hollywood is already rife with the male gaze, and Anora speaks to a wider trend of filmmaking that always, always has a damsel in distress, looking for a man to save her. Ani’s plight only furthers the overarching media stigma against sex work, making it seem filthy rather than an honest profession.
Baker also seemingly pushes Ani to play into the stigma, furthering my belief that Anora just adds to the existing Hollywood bank of films that repress women. There is a strong gender bias in Hollywood and rather than making Ani a strong and nuanced sex worker, Anora simply accentuates the gender gap and plays into a seemingly unbreakable taboo on sex work.
While the Academy Awards are controversial in their own right, Anora tells a story that simply pushes us back in time –– evidenced by Ani’s actions, including when after everything, Ani “chooses” her appointed bodyguard, Igor. For Ani to somehow choose Igor after such extensive trauma speaks to how poorly her story is written.
The film presents itself as an example of a man trying to push a highly specific narrative through his female protagonist without regard to the sensitivity of her story. For this film to have not fallen directly into the damsel in distress trope, Hollywood would need to start accepting that a happy ending does not always involve a woman finding a love interest to absolve her story.
So in all honesty, is the film even worth watching? It feels like the answer is no. Does it deserve Best Picture? Absolutely not.
In addition to a poorly written plot, director Sean Baker has always been controversial for his movie plots. His movies before Anora, such as Red Rocket, have consistently felt like he’s exploiting minority communities to make money on the silver screen.
I’m not alone in feeling like Baker consistently exploits minority narratives for the betterment of his filmography. He talks about trying to remove the “stigma” from sex work, but uses regressive narratives and reductive plot lines to do so. His screenplay speaks to his commitment to portraying minority communities, but the execution — though Madison was a highlight — is disappointing to say the least.
To top all of this off, Anora has consistently been marketed as a low budget indie film. With just $6 million spent on the film, it seems like a dream come true that it swept top awards at the Oscars.
But we have to look behind the scenes. In truth, a big part of the Academy Awards is campaigning for the awards — spending money to subtly manipulate the narrative to get Oscar voters to vote for a particular candidate in the running. On paper, Anora seems like a regular rags-to-riches story but in reality, $18 million was spent on its Oscars campaign, about three times as much as the film’s budget.
Anora should not have won Best Picture. My personal choice would have been Conclave, but reality tells me the Academy Awards are a reflection of a tumultuous industry built on social capital. Hollywood’s persistence in maintaining sexist tropes comes through with this film’s Oscars win. Anora’s regressive narrative and pervading male gaze, alongside its flamboyant cash campaign, are reason enough to have crucified the film rather than put it on its Oscars pedestal.
Jahnavi Kirkire is a senior government and politics and public policy major. She can be reached at jkirkire@umd.edu.
