There is, admittedly, something terribly uncool about rooting for Best Picture Oscar winner – but sometimes the Academy Awards do actually get it right. For Sean Baker’s Anora, crowned during a ceremony that saw it also take home four other awards including Best Director and Best Actress, is as delicious as they come.
A rags to riches tale for 2025, the film begins with Mikey Madison’s Anora, or Ani as she prefers to be called, working as a stripper at a Midtown Manhattan club when a new client (the boisterous, boyish Vanya played by Mark Eydelshteyn) asks for a Russian-speaking dancer. They hit it off. He offers her $15,000 to be his live-in girlfriend for the week; she haggles him to $25,000 and so begins a spell of partying and sex that concludes in a Las Vegas wedding. There is also, amid the drugs and fur coats, genuine affection between the two. The brakes are put on when Vanya’s oligarch parents catch wind of the marriage and send their goons (including the Oscar-nominated Yura Borisov as the soulful, sweet Igor) to squash it.
