The 97th Academy Awards were a triumphant celebration of the best in cinema this past year. Here are four takeaways from the evening.
1: Independent Films Dominate
Anora swept five major awards, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Leading Actress, Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing, the most wins of any nominated film. However, the Palme d’Or winner wasn’t always a dominant frontrunner, and there’s never been a film quite like Anora that’s managed to win Best Picture. The Academy has gone for indie picks in the category before, from Moonlight upsetting La La Land in 2016 to Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland in 2020. Yet, Anora still represents something totally unique: a raucous, irreverent comedy about a sex worker made on a $6 million budget is now a Best Picture winner.
Part of that has to be attributed to the strength of Sean Baker’s resume as a director, with films like The Florida Project, Tangerine, Red Rocket and now Anora, all consistently topping critics’ year-end lists. Sean Baker closed his Best Director acceptance speech by yelling out, “Long live independent film!”
Brady Corbet, director of The Brutalist, lost the award to Baker on Sunday. Nevertheless, Corbet certainly seems destined to win an Academy Award at some point in his career, given the ambition and confidence that the auteur continues to display with his projects. The Brutalist, which has been widely praised by critics as a modern American epic, was made on only a $10 million budget and is itself a marvel of independent filmmaking.
The success of these two films, alongside wins for A Real Pain in Best Supporting Actor and No Other Land in Best Documentary Feature, is a testament to how much the Oscars have shifted from studio-centric blockbusters to more critically acclaimed films that don’t necessarily perform well at the box office.
Most inspiringly, Flow, an animated film with no dialogue that was produced entirely using the open-source software Blender took home the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Gints Zilbalodis, the creator of Flow, accepted Latvia’s first-ever Academy Award. Flow defeated Universal Pictures’ The Wild Robot, which has grossed over $300 million worldwide (more than ten times as much as Flow) and Pixar’s Inside Out 2, which grossed over $1.6 billion on its way to breaking numerous box-office records.
2: Some Things Stay the Same
Despite the success of these indie darlings, some things still stay the same, and it looks like the Academy will never be able to resist its yearly music biopic. Timothée Chalamet played Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, which sleepwalked its way to eight nominations, although the film ultimately went home empty-handed.
Just a month ago, Emilia Pérez seemed on track to compete to win Best Picture. However, intense public backlash against the film and comments made by leading actress Karla Sofía Gascón ultimately relegated the film to little more than a punchline for host Conan O’Brien’s jabs, rather than a serious contender to win any major awards.
Still, the Academy couldn’t completely ignore the film, with Zoe Saldaña winning Best Supporting Actress and “El Mal” winning Best Original Song. The latter resulted in one of the most excruciating moments of the entire show when songwriters Camille and Clément Ducol decided to end their acceptance speech by bursting into operatic song.
Somehow, that still might not be the worst acceptance speech of the night. Those honors go to second-time Best Actor winner Adrien Brody, who set the record for the longest speech in Oscars history. From tossing his gum at his wife before heading onstage to commanding the hosts to stop the music meant to get him to wrap up his speech, Brody’s pretentious and self-glamorizing speech just went on and on and on.
3: Category Fraud
One of the year’s controversies was in the supporting acting categories, where eventual winners Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña were both arguably the lead performers in their respective films. The notion of category fraud has been around for a long time, but this year might be the most explicit example of how films strategically select which race to enter actors into to maximize their chances of winning. Saldaña had more screen time in Emilia Pérez than Gascón, who was submitted as a lead actress, while Culkin repeatedly steals the show with extended monologues in A Real Pain.
Is the Academy losing the definition of a true supporting performance? Isabella Rossellini’s nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Conclave has been championed as a true supporting performance, with only eight minutes of screen time. Culkin and Saldaña both had 58 minutes of screen time, yet both took home an Academy Award.
4: African-American Stories Snubbed
Two of the most acclaimed films of the year, Sing Sing and Nickel Boys, both spoke to the African-American experience in powerful and visionary ways. Both were severely under-nominated, and neither won a single award.
Almost a decade ago, the #OscarsSoWhite controversy in many ways forced the Academy to respond to a fundamental flaw in their voting process. And while the Academy has adjusted its membership to award a more diverse range of people and films, there’s still a long way to go.
As the Oscars continue to embrace independent films, it’s telling that Anora and The Brutalist led the charge, while an equally (if not more) outstanding and revolutionary Black-directed project in Nickel Boys was repeatedly snubbed for industry awards. Sing Sing failed to even receive a nomination for Best Picture.
On the acting side, Aujunae Ellis-Taylor, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Danielle Deadwyler and Clarence Maclin all delivered acclaimed performances – none received an Oscar nomination.
For the Academy to maintain its credibility as an awards body, there simply cannot be this level of disconnect between the performances that are widely recognized as outstanding and what ends up getting nominated at the Oscars. This awards season, it was African-American actors, directors and stories that consistently ended up on the chopping block.
Looking Ahead…
And that’s a wrap on this year’s awards season!
As one season concludes, another begins. 2025 will feature new films from a slew of acclaimed directors, including Bong Joon-ho, both Safdie brothers, Noah Baumbach, Paul Thomas Anderson, Guillermo Del Toro, Yorgos Lanthimos and Celine Song, as well as Avatar and Wicked sequels. Exciting newcomers will enter the spotlight, veteran actors will make another push to finally win that elusive Oscar, and, in one year, ten new films will be crowned by the Academy as the finest achievements of 2025.
