Sean Baker’s warped Cinderella story Anora won best picture at the Oscars 2025, maintaining its place as the de facto front-runner in a historically
Sean Baker’s warped Cinderella story Anora won best picture at the Oscars 2025, maintaining its place as the de facto front-runner in a historically messy awards season. The triumph caps an incredible run for the film, which was made for just $6 million—the third-lowest budget of any best-picture winner over the last 37 years, ahead of only Moonlight and Nomadland. Anora premiered nine months ago at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it won the top prize—the Palme d’Or—and went on to gross more than $40 million globally, one of the great specialty box-office success stories of the year.
Anora also won best director, actress, editing, and original screenplay during this year’s Academy Awards. Baker came into the night tying Walt Disney for the most nominations for a single person in a single year, as the film’s producer, editor, screenwriter, and director. Ultimately, he pulled out a win in every single one of those categories.
This was considered the most competitive best-picture race in the post-COVID era of the Oscars. Emilia Pérez and The Brutalist won the top Golden Globes to kick off the year, but both were ultimately dogged by controversy (especially in the former’s case) and proved too divisive to succeed in the Oscars’ preferential-ballot voting system. Anora then won the top prizes with both the directors and producers guilds, crucial bellwethers on the way to the best-picture Academy Award, but lost some steam to Conclave in the final leg of campaigning. Edward Berger’s papal thriller won the BAFTA Award for best film and SAG’s best-ensemble prize—in both cases, over Anora—promising this messy race would come down to a photo finish.
Anora had long been a bigger critical favorite than its chief rival, and tended to elicit more passion (if less consensus) from voters. Baker’s pitch on the campaign trail as an “indie lifer” reaching the peak of his powers after nearly 30 years of directing features, landed with an industry struggling to keep its indie sector afloat, and eager to embrace a shining example of scrappy, tough personal filmmaking. His raucous, then heartbreaking story of an exotic dancer in Brighton Beach thrust into the messy world of a Russian oligarch’s son resonated for a variety of reasons—but the film’s canny distributor, Neon, settled on a elementary tagline in the homestretch: “Follow your heart.”
“Most awards teams are larger than our whole company. We are not daunted,” Neon’s CEO Tom Quinn told me after the movie emerged as a front-runner last month. “At the end of the day [you’re] following your heart, your passion, what you believe in—and that’s merit-based, that’s not campaigning. For that reason, I always think that we have the same chance, because the Academy Award is a celebration of cinema.”
Following Parasite in 2020, this is Neon’s second best-picture win in six years—making it the only studio to accomplish the feat in that time frame.
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