At last night’s Oscars ceremony, Mikey Madison was dressed like a winner. The star of Sean Baker’s Anora wore a pink Dior gown, a reference, perhaps, to this one Audrey Hepburn wears in Funny Face, and to Gwyneth Paltrow, a fellow Best Actress winner. In the film, Madison plays Ani, a street-smart exotic dancer who is promised the world by the bratty, 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch. The madcap romp that follows sends its characters careening all over Brooklyn. It won Baker the Oscars for Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing, as well as Madison’s award for Best Actress.
Sean Baker, 57, was born in a New Jersey suburb and grew up in the shadow of New York. After being raised on a diet of shiny 1980s blockbusters, he studied film at New York University and fell in love with the city’s characters. Baker has spoken about his own struggles with opiate addiction when he was in his twenties, a possible reason for his interest in protagonists that live on the margins of society. His stories centre sex workers, immigrants and people whose “livelihood or lifestyle has had unfair stigma applied to it”, as he put it in an interview with NPR.
The sun-drenched Starlet (2012) considers a tender friendship between a porn actress (Dree Hemingway, daughter of Mariel) and an elderly widow (Besedka Johnson), while his 2015 breakthrough Tangerine is a modern screwball caper that casts two trans sex workers (played by Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) as its heroines. The action is shot on an iPhone and takes place on Christmas Eve. In both The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (2021), Baker’s focus moved from Los Angeles to the southern US (both films also took him to Cannes). The Florida Project follows a single mother (Instagram personality Bria Vinaite) and her six-year-old daughter (a memorable child performance from Brooklynn Kimberly Prince), who are living in a motel on the outskirts of Disney World. In Red Rocket, which takes place in Texas, a washed-up adult actor (Simon Rex) sees an opportunity in a 17-year-old girl he nicknames Strawberry (Suzanna Son). In Anora, Baker returns to New York, setting the film in the Russian community of south Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach.
Inspired by the grit, sleaze and mayhem of 1970s New York films including Panic in Needle Park and The French Connection, as well as the naturalism and warm humanity of British social realists such as Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, Baker has spent eight films honing a very specific perspective. The bleakness of his characters’ situations, which often involve financial instability and precarious housing, are offset by a heightened pop aesthetic. You couldn’t call his style drab. In all of Baker’s films, there is a visual exuberance, with doughnut shops and shopping malls and strip clubs rendered in vibrant neons and pastels.
Though Baker’s characters are often sex workers, sex work is not really his subject. “I like to see it as people who are chasing the American dream, but don’t have easy access to it,” he has said. The longing for money, opportunity and freedom is something he presents as timeless and universal. Still, he prefers to observe the material realities of his dreamers than to challenge the structures that shape them. His characters rarely end up escaping their circumstances; their dreams are frequently dashed.
In an interview with the LA Times, Baker said he saw the purpose of art as “bringing people together and sparking discussion”, not as a vehicle for his personal politics. Baker has positioned himself as an ally and friend to marginalised people, often casting people with lived experience in his films and co-authoring their characters with them. He’s by their side, chronicling their complexities with humour and warmth – though some sex workers saw Anora as a missed opportunity to tell the story from Ani’s point of view. A scene in which Ani is physically restrained by Yuri Borisov’s gruff but gentle Igor is played for comic effect, yet the laughs won’t land for everyone. It reveals Baker as an outsider with privileged access, nose pressed up against the glass.
This is key when considering Anora’s sweep at the Oscars. The awards are a useful barometer of how Academy voters see themselves, and the people they choose to celebrate. As well as his four Oscars, Baker also recently won a handful of Independent Spirit awards for Anora: in his Best Director acceptance speech at that ceremony, he described himself as “an indie film lifer” who refuses to see indie films “as calling cards” that merely enable artists to secure a more lucrative series or a studio film. “We want complete artistic freedom and the freedom to cast who is right for the role,” he said, adding that he and like-minded film-makers didn’t want to be forced to make casting decisions that consider box-office value and social media followers.
Baker comes from the world of independent film-making; he is an all-hands-on-deck kind of guy who writes, directs and edits his own work. This is what’s actually “progressive” – not the story of a sex worker’s gallant attempt to outwit a depressing “fate”; but the Academy’s recognition of a fast, funny, sparky film helmed by an old-fashioned auteur.
[See also: How Emilia Pérez sabotaged its own Oscars campaign]
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