Oscars: Maybe It Was 'Anora' All Along. Plus, a 'Conclave' Confab
The surge no one saw coming for Sean Baker's film
After emerging from a whirlwind of awards season events this weekend, I admit I felt a little unmoored by my return to so-called reality. What do you mean people also care about the Philadelphia Eagles or what’s going on in the White House? Don’t they know the Oscar race has been upended yet again?!
I was in the room at the Critics Choice Awards on Friday, where the winning talent had to acknowledge — sometimes begrudgingly — the existence of critics. I also attended the Producers Guild Awards on Saturday, where jokes about net profit participation brought the house down. Awards season is always a bubble, but at these soirees — where the clips that play to highlight nominees feel like mini-FYC ads for any Oscar voters who might be in the room — the inside-baseball intensity is scaled up significantly.
So that means when you win at one of these Oscar-precursor events, you win big. In today’s dispatch I assess what three very significant victories mean for the prospects of Anora, which could now very well become the second Palme d’Or-winning underdog shepherded by Neon to Oscar glory. And then I’ve got details from The Ankler’s own role in the awards season spectacle, teaming up with Letterboxd last week to host another Audience First screening and Q&A with the production team behind Conclave.
Anora Wins Over Three Tough Crowds
Toward the end of the Critics Choice Awards on Friday night, it was hard to tell who seemed more surprised: Wicked’s Jon M. Chu, who prevailed in an eight-person field to win best director, or Sean Baker, who accepted the best picture prize for Anora just as the whole room had decided Chu’s win meant that Wicked would take it.
The triumph of Anora, the first film to ever take the Critics Choice top award without winning a single other prize from the group, appeared on Friday like a quirky indicator of how wide-open Oscar’s best picture field still was. I spoke to Chu just before the start of the PGA Awards, and he swore to me that he hadn’t prepared a speech for the Critics Choice event because he was certain he wouldn’t win. He also said he was enjoying the unpredictability of the season.
When I mentioned that Baker also seemed surprised by his Critics Choice honor, Chu responded with what felt like genuinely enthusiastic praise for Anora’s director and the film’s whole team. Yes, Chu is a famously nice guy, and praising your fellow nominees is standard awards season practice. But in retrospect it’s clear Chu is far from the only industry member who’s glad to see Anora succeed.
In the span of an hour on Saturday, at two separate ceremonies about a mile apart, Baker won top awards from the Directors Guild and the PGA. “Decisive” is really the only way to describe the tidal shift toward Anora. As my fellow pundits and I have spent the past weeks pondering the narratives of box office hits A Complete Unknown and Wicked and the impact of scandals around The Brutalist (minor) and Emilia Pérez (not minor), it might have just been Anora all along.
Perhaps there should be some truth and reconciliation committee about the blind spots in the pundit world that led us to discount Anora — especially considering it entered the season as the presumed frontrunner after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes last May. But when it was blanked at the Golden Globes then received a relatively modest six Oscar nominations, Anora began to look like a less robust contender. Sure, it could still win an Oscar for original screenplay or even editing, but best picture seemed further out of reach.
As if we needed another reminder of something we know perfectly well: The Golden Globes don’t represent industry consensus at all, with its foreign voters who likely have no crossover into the Academy and oddities like a scoreboard keeping track of winners that night by studio.
This weekend’s three victories, on the other hand, absolutely prove Anora can be a consensus winner and perhaps has been the one to beat from the get-go. Critics Choice voting deadline was Jan. 10, which means plenty of voters watched Anora lose at the Golden Globes and voted for it anyway.
The Directors Guild and the Producers Guild, albeit with some overlap among their members, represent two large and hugely influential industry constituencies, and both have major predictive power when it comes to the Oscars. It is exceedingly rare for a film to win with both groups and not go on to win best picture. The last film to experience such a reversal was Sam Mendes’ 1917, but given that its path to Oscar victory in 2020 was cut off by another Neon-backed Palme d’Or winner, Parasite, I imagine the Neon team is not sweating that particular historical precedent.
I’ll be honest: I did not see any of this coming, up to the moment Baker’s name was read at each of these three ceremonies. With about 30 minutes to go at the PGA Awards, the Anora entourage snuck in, fresh from Baker’s DGA win, and took their seats at the table behind mine, looking slightly breathless. When their film was announced, producer Samantha Quan (also Baker’s wife) looked as shocked as anyone, and she, Baker and fellow producer Alex Coco took the stage in a flurry of energy.
During all three of their speeches this weekend, Baker and his fellow producers highlighted Anora’s miniscule budget ($6 million, the smallest of any Oscar best picture nominee) and the importance of its theatrical run. “We have to go for it to stay on the big screen,” Baker said, addressing his fellow independent filmmakers, during his Critics Choice speech. “We made this film for the big screen. We thank everybody who saw it on the big screen.”
It’s a message Baker has been emphasizing throughout Anora’s campaign, but it feels especially suited to the industry voters who are about to open their ballots — and who, once again, are probably not going to pick the Netflix movie that barely had a theatrical run. Anora is not the biggest box office hit in the race, but as an indie success story in a time that desperately needs them, it might have exactly the right message for the moment.
A Conclave Confab
During the PGA Awards I was sitting at the table for Conclave, another Oscar best picture contender with a robust box office run to brag about. The Focus Features release, a fictional saga set within the Vatican as the cardinals gather to select a new pope, has grossed $91 million worldwide and is still getting an awards season bump in theaters.
The Conclave crew at my table — nominated producers Michael Jackman and Tessa Ross, screenwriter Peter Straughan and composer Volker Bertelmann — were also genuinely thrilled by Anora’s win. A few days earlier, before I moderated an onstage conversation about Conclave — part of The Ankler and Letterboxd’s Audience First FYC Screening series — Jackman had told me he was particularly gratified by how many independent productions are in contention for Oscar’s best picture this year. Conclave may have the polish and star power of a classic studio drama, but it was an indie play from the jump, when Ross read early chapters of Robert Harris’ 2016 novel of the same name and thought she could see it onscreen.
Ross was the executive producer behind a long string of awards season hits in her time as the head of Film4 in London; before the PGA dinner began she told me about the experience of backing Slumdog Millionaire, which was nearly dropped by its U.S. distributor before it won best picture. She knows, in other words, how hard it can be to get a movie — even a really good movie — the attention it deserves.
At our Audience First screening last Wednesday, believe me, Conclave held the spotlight. Director Edward Berger, costume designer Lisy Christl and editor Nick Emerson also joined the panel, offering a wide-ranging view of the collaboration required to recreate the insular process of choosing a new pope. Straughan and Ross took the initial tour of the Vatican for research, for example, but it was Berger who discovered the turtle pond that makes a vivid cameo in the film. And though Christl did her research on the robes worn by cardinals in the real Vatican, she and Berger were also inspired by a Balenciaga fashion show in their vision for the film’s ecclesiastical garb.
Conclave is Berger’s follow-up to All Quiet on the Western Front, which captures the muddy horrors of World War I in vivid detail. “It’s my running joke,” Christl said on stage. “First I had to go through the trenches, and then I was allowed to go to Rome.” But she and Bertelmann were both eager to reunite with Berger, with the composer creating a score that is by turns propulsive and subtle.
“I really love that there’s quietness, because that makes a lot of the impactful elements so much more powerful,” said Bertelmann, who also explained how he and Emerson worked together in the edit room to get the images and music in perfect alignment. “In the end, when you see the final product, you’re feeling like ‘Oh I actually love watching the movie.’ Which is not always the case.”
Berger, too, clearly still finds joy in watching his own film; as we prepared to head onstage for the Q&A, he watched the credits roll, despite presumably having seen them many times by now. “There’s so many nations in the credits — it’s basically very pan-European,” he told me when I asked about it. “You come together from so many countries, and it’s a wonderful mix of people. What a great job that brings together people from all walks of life.”
Watch my full panel conversation with the Conclave production team at Ankler Enjoy, and stay tuned later this week for the scoop from our other Audience First event with Letterboxd this past weekend, presenting Netflix’s Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
