"Anora"

A new Oscar frontrunner has emerged because, well, the Academy can't just announce, "Sorry, there were no worthy movies in 2024. We'll try again next year."

Anora is a sex comedy (although that’s stretching the term “comedy:” Anora elicits more chuckles than laughs) about a New York stripper/whore who marries her richest client, a Russian oligarch’s childish heir, on their trip to Las Vegas. But then the kid’s formidable parents in Moscow hear about it and sic their Armenian fixers (along with their Russian flathead goon-with-a-heart-of-gold) on her to try to threaten and cajole her into agreeing to annul the marriage.

Last weekend, Anora emerged as the frontrunner to win the Oscar for Best Picture because, as Quentin Tarantino recently noted, “2019 was the last ******* year for movies,” but they can’t just call off the Oscar ceremony for lack of deserving recipients.

So, something’s gotta win.

Emilia Perez, which was gifted as many Oscar nominations, 13, as From Here to Eternity and The Fellowship of the Ring, had been expected to sweep the Academy Awards, with some Spanish dude who announced in his 40s that his wife and child supported him in his decision to become who he truly is, a lady, slated to win Best Actress award as a stunning and brave rebuke to Trump and Vance. But then it turned out from the ex-man’s tweets that, like so many ex-men (as I’ve been pointing out for years), he’s a deplorable right-winger, with an inappropriately irreverent attitude toward St. George Floyd.

Next in line with 10 nominations are Wicked, which I reviewed here, and The Brutalist.

Wicked is the kind of thing you like if you like that kind of thing.

The Brutalist is just plain bad.

It now looks like the movie Establishment has gotten itself off the hook of its absurd initial enthusiasm for The Brutalist by ginning up a scandal about how AI was used to make Adrien Brody’s Hungarian dialogue sound more Hungarian.

Hence, why not Anora as Best Picture? After all, it got six Oscar nods, including in the prestigious categories of Best Picture (Sean Baker), Best Directing (Sean Baker), Best Original Screenplay (Sean Baker), Best Editing (Sean Baker), and Best Actress (Sean Baker Mikey Madison).

And I really liked its Best Supporting Actor nominee Yura Borisov, the first Russian Best Supporting Actor nod since Mikhail Baryshnikov in the 1970s.

So, why not Anora?

Paywall here.

Well, because while it’s not as bad as The Brutalist, it’s not great either. It’s pretty good, but it would have had a hard time even getting a Best Picture nomination as recently as 2019 against Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Parasite, Ford v. Ferrari, Marriage Story, Joker, The Irishman, Little Women, 1917, and Jojo Rabbit.

But with theatrical movies wrecked in 2024 by the plagues of covid and wokeness, Anora is currently sweeping the craft awards.

And yet, it’s not a particularly well-crafted movie. For one thing, it’s 2 hours and 19 minutes long. By way of comparison, Woody Allen’s romantic comedy Annie Hall, which beat Star Wars for the 1977 Best Picture award, was 1 hour and 33 minutes long. And Woody Allen at his peak was a lot funnier than Sean Baker.

Anora has enough plot twists for 93 minutes — although the best one, that the right man for her isn’t the vapid billionaire youth but the soulful Russian hard man who looks like a cross between Vladimir Putin and Channing Tatum, is obvious early on.

But at 139 minutes, it’s repetitious and tiresome in a 1970s John Cassavetes slice of life way.

For example, the rich kid starts out as if he might be endearing as well a rich, doing a backward somersault into bed for the first of their dozen or two sex scenes (which aren’t erotic to watch in a you-kinda-had-to-be-there way). But after that one moment of charm, the kid does absolutely nothing besides play video games, smoke dope, and complain.

The characters in Anora are underwritten. For instance, why is the Russian dad so rich? The boy has the prostitute look his dad up on Google, but the script doesn’t divulge what she finds out. A screenwriter like Billy Wilder would have had a lot of fun with the lady of the evening haltingly pronouncing some term such as “mobylendeum monopolist,” but Sean Baker is above that kind of intelligent amusement.

How Russian is the Jewish-looking brunette Anora supposed to be? She says she has a Russian-speaking grandmother, which is why her Manhattan strip club manager recruits her into entertaining the drunken Russian big spender. But, are there no hot blonde Russian strippers in a Manhattan club? Really?

And how Jewish is Anora? Mikey Madison looks and is 100% Valley Girl Jewish. (The San Fernando Valley is filling up with people who are kinda Jewish and kinda Russian: the atheistic Soviet Union having discouraged its subjects from religious endogamy. But Ms. Madison is old-fashioned all Jewish.) She looks like Fran Drescher’s homelier little sister with bad hair.

How much does their new daughter-in-law’s apparent Jewishness matter to the Russian parents? An interesting question, but, like so many potential topics, this never comes up in Anora.

Are the two Armenians brothers? One line in the script suggest so, but nothing else does. So, maybe, maybe not, but mostly we don’t care.

And why is the Russian warrior in Brighton Beach rather than fighting Ukrainians in the Donetsk?

Why does the more cunning of the two Armenians physically yank the six-figure four-carat wedding ring from the bride’s finger, then insist she accompany them to a New York courtroom … where she could rightfully have them arrested for grand larceny? Admittedly, this robbery sets up the touching final scene in which [Spoiler Alert] the true-hearted Russian thug returns to Anora the ring he pick-pocketed back from his Armenian boss. But a smarter screenwriter could have figured out a solution that didn’t offend intelligent viewers.

Granted, real life often is just as tedious, poorly-paced, and suffused with dull dialogue as Anora, but handing out the Best Picture Oscar to Anora for being a more realistic hooker Cinderella story than Pretty Woman seems sad.

Note that Pretty Woman only got one Oscar nomination: for Julia Roberts. And that great leading lady didn’t even win.

The movie business was different back then.