Does Anora deserve the backlash?

Usually, when a film wins Best Picture at the Oscars, the inevitable backlash takes years, if not decades, to come to the surface. Sometimes, it’s simply because the “wrong film” won (Crash over Brokeback Mountain, Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan), and on other occasions, it is because a film’s social or sexual politics have dated incredibly badly. (Here’s looking at you, American Beauty.) Yet after what must be the most contentious and controversial Oscar season in living memory, during which no fewer than four separate films were all tipped for glory at one point, the eventual victor ludorum, Sean Baker’s Anora, is facing a vicious and sustained assault on its credentials that is without precedent.

It is the nature of lo-fi indie filmmaking that the directors often finds themselves performing every on-set task, including and up to the catering. Nonetheless the Academy’s decision to give Baker four separate Oscars in the same ceremony (for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing), for the four categories he was responsible, felt like a rush to be seen to honor the most politically appropriate picture of the year. Given that the previous front-runner Emilia Peréz became a liability long before voting finished, Baker’s much-praised account of the romance that develops between a sex worker and an oligarch’s son seemed to be the perfect liberal choice, eschewing the complexities of The Brutalist (“Where do we stand on Jewish immigrants?”) and Conclave (“Isn’t the Catholic church institutionally bad?”)

Unfortunately, Anora now faces criticism on two separate fronts. Baker’s previous films, including The Florida Project and Tangerine, attracted praise for their compassionate treatment of the marginalized outsiders in American society. Attention, however, has now turned to his 2017 movie Red Rocket, in which a faded (male) adult film star attempts to recruit a teenage girl into the industry. Even at the time, there was a general acknowledgement that the film trod a fine line between balanced nuance and potential exploitation, and now that Anora has once again returned to the theme of paid-for sex, word has spread over the internet that Baker’s potentially problematic past career should be looked at more closely.

This is, of course, ridiculous. Nobody would accuse Martin Scorsese of being a gangster because of his Mafia pictures, just as few would suggest that John Carpenter moonlit between Halloween films by dressing up as Michael Myers and murdering teenage girls. Yet there are more heavyweight criticisms of Anora that cannot be so easily dismissed. Whether it’s the casting of Russian actors in the lead roles who have taken, if not exactly a pro-Putin/anti-Ukraine stance, a position of deliberate silence on this particular hot-button political issue, or the film’s presentation of sex work, it has attracted particular upset for its star Mikey Madison saying to the sex-worker community, as she accepted Best Actress at the Oscars, “I just want to say that I see you. You deserve respect and human decency. I will always be a friend and an ally, and I implore others to do the same.”

Madison has been acting since she was a teenager and her affluent life in a Los Angeles suburb with her psychologist parents is a world away from the impoverished milieu of many of Baker’s protagonists. She would suggest that she is an actress, not a real-life stripper, and that her deserved acclaim for the part comes from her ability to inhabit a nuanced and contradictory character. This is, again, fair enough. Yet it is harder to deflect the online accusations that some sex workers had been consulted by Baker but neither paid for nor credited for their input, just as its suggestion that marriage to an oligarch’s son represents a brilliant opportunity to escape from the hellscape of stripping is no more sophisticated a plotline than could be found in Pretty Woman, three and a half decades ago.

There is considerable debate presently whether sex work can be described as “empowering” — the opportunity to make money independently, whether from escorting, stripping or whatever hybrid OnlyFans represents — or “degrading,” given that financial success largely stems from catering to the hungry, predatory male gaze. Anora may have attempted to deal with these controversies with wit and intelligence — hence the Oscars — but the very real backlash against it shows few signs of dissipating. Perhaps, in years to come, the Academy may wish that they’d gone for Conclave, after all.