The Current Debate connects the dots around a topic of the critical conversation.
Anora (Sean Baker, 2024).
Remember Cord Jefferson’s plea at last year’s Oscars? Picking up his Best Adapted Screenplay award for American Fiction (2023), the director chided the industry for being “risk-averse,” and suggested that, “instead of making one $200 million movie,” producers should spread those resources to make room for more diverse and bolder voices. “Try making twenty $10 million movies,” he said, “or fifty $4 million movies.” Jefferson was of course alluding to Oppenheimer (2023), Christopher Nolan’s thunderous portrait of “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer, a $100-million Best Picture winner that racked up seven statuettes and nearly a billion dollars at the box office. A year later, a cursory glance at the list of 2025 Oscar winners might make you think the industry did, in fact, heed the call.
It’s not that there were no big-budget films among the nominees; the ten Best Picture contenders included Jon M. Chu’s Wicked and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two (all films 2024, unless noted), splashy blockbusters with triple-digit budgets ($150 million and $190 million, respectively) that dwarfed those of their rivals. But the most coveted statuettes went to independent films made for a fraction of those gargantuan sums.
Tying the record for the most Oscars won in a single night, previously held by Walt Disney, who won four awards for four different titles in 1954, Sean Baker emerged as the night’s undisputed winner, taking home as many awards for the same film. His Anora, a cantankerous Cinderella-esque comedy about a young woman from Brighton Beach, earned him Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, Editing, Directing, and Picture—an award he shared with coproducers Alex Coco and Samantha Quan—while the film’s star, Mikey Madison, was crowned Best Actress in a Leading Role. Made for $6 million, Anora had the smallest budget of all Best Picture nominees; in his acceptance speech for Best Director, Baker noted that the theater-going experience “is under threat” before making a battle cry for cinemas and calling on filmmakers to “keep making films for the big screen.”
The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024).
Anora wasn’t the only independent film to win big. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a character study of a fictional Jewish architect who flees the horrors of the Holocaust to settle and resume his career in the US, nabbed three prizes: Best Cinematography (Lol Crawley), Best Original Score (Daniel Blumberg), and Best Actor in a Leading Role (Adrien Brody). Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow, the Best Animated Feature winner, edged out two higher-profile blockbusters in its category, Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and DreamWorks’s The Wild Robot. The award for Best Documentary Feature went to one of the year’s most essential watches, No Other Land, an incendiary look at the Israeli military’s destruction of homes in the Palestinian village of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank. Directed by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, the film—notwithstanding the many accolades it picked up since its Berlinale premiere last year—is still without a US distributor, and has been self-released by the filmmakers with the help of Cinetic Media and mTuckman Media. Elsewhere, Kieran Culkin won Best Supporting Actor for his turn in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, while The Substance earned Pierre-Olivier Persin, Stéphanie Guillon, and Marilyne Scarselli an Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.
Different as these titles might be, they were all independently made with budgets below $20 million. This is not exactly novel. As Stephanie Zacharek notes at Time, most of the Best Picture winners from the past five years—Parasite (2019), Nomadland (2020), Coda (2021), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)—came from outside the big American studio system:
This last Oscars race in general, and Baker’s film in particular, only reinforce that trend. We can’t even accurately call it the rise of the indie film, because this trend has been bubbling for years now, first as we were in the thick of the pandemic and then as we figured out how to climb out of it.
Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve, 2024).
It’s tempting to read the David-versus-Goliath successes of smaller titles as a sign of progress for the entire art form. Those worried about the fate of cinema, Kate Erbland writes at IndieWire, need only look at “the originality and ingenuity” of the night’s biggest winners: “Film isn’t dead, never has been, and now suddenly feels flush with talent eager and able to make films with true artistic freedom.”
But the enthusiasm, however legitimate, masks a more complex reality. For starters, there’s an astonishing asymmetry between the number of people who saw feted indies like Anora and The Brutalist (which have thus far grossed $46 million and $45 million respectively worldwide) and the crowds that flocked to watch blockbusters like Dune: Part Two or Wicked, each grossing over $700 million dollars to date. The simple truth, Richard Brody observes at the New Yorker, is that “the movies that are winning Oscars aren’t drawing large audiences to theatres,” and despite Baker’s impassioned calls to distributors, directors, and moviegoers to watch films in cinemas, “the effort to reach wide audiences with niche movies is akin to exhorting readers to buy printed newspapers and magazines; it’s an appeal to nostalgia.”
Possibly in an attempt to narrow the chasm between big and small nominees—and rejuvenate a ceremony whose ratings by the late 2010s were in a free fall—in 2018 the Academy toyed with the idea of adding a new trophy for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film. It was a deranged suggestion that would have created all sorts of pernicious incentives for voters, filmmakers, and studios, as The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr warned at the time. Though the Academy wound up scrapping that plan, the vast discrepancies in box-office returns between titles big and small have remained, pointing to the largely unfavorable market environment indie filmmakers must navigate.
Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024).
“There’s a romantic and comforting underdog narrative that accompanies the success of these movies,” Manohla Dargis argues at the New York Times, “though as Baker recently pointed out at the Independent Spirit Awards, the economics of indie filmmaking are unsustainable.” Corbet himself said as much a few days before Oscars night; as Ethan Shanfeld reports at Variety, the director’s first real paycheck in a long time came from directing three Bloomberg ads in Portugal.
But also, how many indies can count on the support of a powerhouse like Anora’s US distributor, Neon? Following their 2020 Best-Picture win for Parasite, the company spent a staggering $18 million on Anora’s marketing (three times the film’s budget!), which included merchandise like “little wifey” thongs, posters, and T-shirts with slogans from the film, from “Stay jealous, babe!” to “You hit the lotto, bitch!” “The campaign’s eventual success is evidence of the cut-through of such a strategy,” Catherine Shoard suggests at the Guardian, “as well as the evolving makeup of the Academy’s demographic,” as Anora’s main rivals—Conclave, A Complete Unknown, and The Brutalist—“were all perceived to have fans that were older, white and male, a hegemony the Academy has sought to correct in recent years.” Not to be outdone, The Brutalist’s distributor, A24, did put out some merch for Corbet’s feature too, including a $75 small-scale model of the community center designed by the film’s protagonist, itself shaped after Buchenwald. This isn’t to chalk up the success of Anora and The Brutalist to some underwear and toys. It’s to stress that the independently produced films that took home the most coveted awards were ultimately picked up by distributors willing to funnel exorbitant amounts of money to keep them on voters’ radars throughout awards season.
Anora “Little Wifey” Thong, available from Neon.
Shoard’s point about the Academy’s changing demographics is one worth dissecting further; as IndieWire’s Anne Thompson remarks, over twenty percent of the Academy’s 10,000 voters now belong to the international bloc, and a more diverse body can only yield more heterogeneous picks. But if films as wildly different as Anora and The Brutalist could emerge as the night’s success stories, perhaps it’s also because, singular as they are, they are both steeped in a particularly seductive kind of cinematic nostalgia. Writing about Anora over at Slate, Dan Kois argues that the film’s explicitness is the reason its triumph feels so extraordinary: “There’s never been a Best Picture winner so upfront about sex, so explicit in its portrayal of sex, so forthright about the woman at the center using sex as a tool.” Anora is not the story of a woman’s sexual pleasure, but “it is a movie about a woman’s sexual agency, and in that respect, its Best Picture victory is one for the ages.” Still, for all its refreshing and frank depictions of sex, Anora nonetheless feels like a descendant of the screwball comedies of Old Hollywood—a narrative that was cemented as early as last May, when Cannes Jury President Greta Gerwig, upon presenting Baker with his Palme d’Or, hailed the director for resurrecting the spirit of Ernst Lubitsch and Howard Hawks. As for Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour saga, it was designed to mimic the look and scale of the Hollywood epics from the 1940s and ’50s, and shot entirely on VistaVision—a widescreen format introduced by Paramount in 1954 as a bigger, if short-lived, alternative to CinemaScope.
“Maybe the secret truth is that the Academy is looking for an old Hollywood in the new indie landscape,” A. A. Dowd wonders at The Ringer.
Anora may be viscerally modern, even topical in its focus on the way oligarchs have tightened their vise grip around working-class Americans, but it’s also a film that calls back to the values of yesterday’s studio fare—to the screwball spirit of Golden Age comedies and to the grittiness of New Hollywood character studies. The film almost seems to have emerged from a reality where cinema skipped straight from the 1970s until now, right past 50-plus years of blockbusters.
Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019).
Seen in this light, doesn’t the excitement for these indies’ victories look familiar? In an eye-opening piece published at The Ringer before Oscar night, Adam Nayman recalls the collective hysteria that followed Parasite’s success in 2020, when Bong Joon-ho’s sweep of major categories was seen by many as ushering in a new era of bold, diverse, and uncompromising films by directors eager to push cinema into uncharted territories.
Five years later, that new era is over, depending on who you ask. Or maybe it never really started in the first place. Notwithstanding 2024’s selection of Oppenheimer—a flawed but worthy work by a major director that also happened to gross nearly a billion dollars, making its victory inevitable—the 2020s have so far yielded a pretty feeble crop of Best Picture winners: Nomadland, CODA, and Everything Everywhere All at Once—a movie made partially under the sign of Parasite, with considerably less discipline. 2025’s nominees include a few “artistically ambitious, diverse, of-the-moment movies,” but arguably only one great one: not The Brutalist, which surely strives for greatness, but Nickel Boys, a challenging and emotional reinvigoration of period-piece storytelling that was fumbled by its distributor, Amazon MGM Studios. (Nickel Boys has made less than $3 million in theaters; it’s yet to go into wide release.) […] Edward Berger’s Conclave—which just copped a best ensemble acting award from the Screen Actors Guild—feels largely like a throwback to the middlebrow awards bait of the 1980s and ’90s, right down to the presence of an unsmiling Ralph Fiennes.
This is why, to borrow again from the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, “the success of independent films at this year’s Oscars is, for the most part, only a semblance of progress.” The night’s true champions “may have been made on stringent budgets and under stressful conditions, but they’re aesthetically conservative—not an advance in cinematic form but a throwback to the earnest realism and the sentimental humanism that was long the domain of Hollywood rather than of the most advanced art-house cinema.”
Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024).
Whether or not some of these wins can be written off as a sort of Hollywood throwback, several accolades handed out on March 2 marked significant and promising steps forward in terms of diversity. That Sunday was “a night of American Dreams fulfilled,” per Justin Chang at the New Yorker, “and of several gratifying historic firsts.” Accepting his Oscar for Best Costume Design for Wicked, Paul Tazewell remarked that he was the first Black man to win in his category; Zoe Saldaña, named Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Emilia Pérez, stated that she was “the first American of Dominican origin to accept an Academy Award”; Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here took home Brazil’s first Oscar for Best International Feature Film; and Flow’s statuette is Latvia’s first.
It is possible to appreciate these historic wins while maintaining some healthy skepticism about the new era they might herald. Prophecies about seismic creative shifts in the film industry seem no less naïve today than they did in 2020, not only for the dire financial prospects of independent productions, but also for the predilection the Academy has historically shown for titles that call to mind Hollywood’s halcyon years. That inward-looking attitude doesn’t bode well for creatively intransigent voices, and it might also account for why this year’s ceremony felt so politically timid. The first Oscars of the second Trump administration were conspicuously silent on some of the most flagrant atrocities of our troubled 2025—save for the acceptance speech by Basel Adra for No Other Land, which called on the world to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people; the “Slava Ukraini” Daryl Hannah exclaimed before presenting the Academy Award for Best Editing; and host Conan O’Brien’s vague references to our “divisive” times.
I'm Still Here (Walter Salles, 2024).
“Movies are about image-making,” Jesse Hassenger writes at the Guardian, “and at a time when so much rightwing radicalism is being passed off as normal, there were plenty of opportunities to refute that narrative.” True, but “if the Oscars felt more limited in their scope this year, it wasn’t because they didn’t have a cause,” Alison Willmore contends at Vulture, “it was because that cause had become the movies themselves.” Accepting his Oscar for Best Directing, Sean Baker spoke not about Anora, but about the growingly unsustainable art of making films, citing the 1,000 theaters that shuttered during the pandemic in the US alone and exhorting everyone to “keep the great tradition of the movie-going experience alive and well.”
Perhaps this explains the contemporary resonance of the Oscars: at the very least, Stephanie Zacharek ponders at Time, “they can provide a roadmap for viewers/consumers who want to care about movies—who want to see them big” the way Baker was advocating, “even though in many parts of the country they might need to drive 100 miles (or more) to do so.” And if we really do care about the artistry that goes into making a film—especially one produced on a tight budget—then “we need to make a little bit of an effort to seek it out, even if that just means waiting for a movie to come to the closest screen, wherever that may be.”
Either way, it’s time to acknowledge that independently made or smaller films aren’t gaining ground on the awards playing field; they are the playing field, the new version of what we call Hollywood, even if they’re not necessarily emerging from the traditional Hollywood-studio path. This is a good thing, the only thing that’s going to push movies into the future. Forget the greedy streamers: leave the job of filmmaking to people who care, to people like Corbet and Eisenberg, Fargeat and Zilbalodis. As for Baker: According to New York Times journalist Kyle Buchanan, he arrived late to his own celebratory Oscar party. He’d gone home first to walk his dog. Now that’s commitment.