By Alissa Wilkinson
Sean Baker came equipped with extra speeches, and that was wise: On the night of the Oscars, he wound up onstage four times to receive four statues.
That’s not just unusual. It’s almost unheard-of.
Baker’s film “Anora,” about a sex worker in New York City’s Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn who marries the son of a Russian oligarch and then watches it all go sideways, earned five Oscars overall on Sunday. One went to its ingénue star, Mikey Madison, and four to Baker: best director, best original screenplay, best editing and best picture.
By taking home four Oscars on a single night, Baker joins just one other luminary: none other than Walt Disney, who pulled off the same trick in 1954. That year, Disney won best documentary feature (“The Living Desert”), best documentary short subject (“The Alaskan Eskimo”), best cartoon short subject (“Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom”) and best two-reel short subject (“Bear Country”).
But even Disney didn’t pull off Baker’s feat: earning four Oscars on one night for the same movie. Doing so requires wearing a lot of hats, and Baker, who started his career in ultra-low-budget independent films, has a deep hat rack.
Movies are a collaborative art, and even the most hands-on filmmakers work with a team of artists and craftspeople. But writing, directing, editing and producing a film leaves a distinctive personal mark. Disney, who was heavily involved with his studio’s projects, certainly did so. Similarly, “Anora” audiences who know Baker’s work probably spotted his fingerprints from the moment the film starts. (And not just because Baker emulates John Carpenter, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson by sticking with one typeface for the titles of all his films — Aguafina Script Pro, if you were wondering.)
One of Baker’s hallmarks, the one people most often associate with him, is a focus on people who live on the margins of society, especially but not exclusively sex workers.
His 2015 film “Tangerine,” shot entirely on iPhones, is a zingy, zany comedy about transgender sex workers who go on a wild chase on Christmas Eve, shot mostly in seedier parts of Los Angeles. “The Florida Project,” Baker’s moving 2017 drama that landed Willem Dafoe an Oscar nomination, centers on a little girl named Moonee who lives with her single mother in a budget motel just outside Orlando, Florida. Her mother can’t make ends meet, and eventually begins soliciting sex work online. The star of “Red Rocket,” Baker’s 2021 film, is a middle-aged porn star who’s down on his luck.
But it would be a mistake to imagine that Baker’s movies focus narrowly on sex work. Those are his characters, but the stories have a wider lens. He’s interested in the American dream, in the idea that if you just work hard enough, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make something of your life. Every one of his films features characters who’ve tried that and found it lacking. In his films, the American dream is a fairy tale — a beautiful story we repeat to one another that for many goes sour.
That’s the story of “Anora,” in which the titular enterprising young woman, played by Madison, seems to be alone in the world. She has family somewhere, but we get the clear sense that she’s been making it on her own for a long time. Her job at a high-end Midtown Manhattan strip club pays well enough, but more important, it’s where she meets her prince, who sweeps her into a fantasy world.
That’s the first act of the film; the second is a screwball comedy, and in the third we realize at one pivotal moment that our plucky heroine is not going to win the day. It’s devastating, and it’s exactly in keeping with the kind of tales Baker likes to tell. He dips into classic Hollywood genres but reimagines them for the world his characters inhabit. They live in worlds laced with neon and sunshine and last-ditch attempts to stay positive, where the promised reward is always just out of reach.
That’s a repeated theme across Baker’s films, and “The Florida Project” makes it almost literal. The characters live in the Magic Castle, a euphemistic name for a place that’s populated mostly by people who are barely holding their lives together. All that Moonee can access, despite her mother’s devoted attempts to raise them out of poverty, are cheap imitations of the glittery world just beyond her home. Their motel is, tantalizingly, just a stone’s throw from Walt Disney World.
When fairy tales don’t pan out the way movies have promised, we feel cheated. Disney, and the world he created, is as responsible as anyone for creating those expectations, for giving generations of viewers the idea that Prince Charming is coming or that the evil villain will be vanquished by true love.
Baker’s take on those stories, which are full of love for his characters and his audience, turns that pattern inside out. His extraordinary Oscar night has a strange kind of resonance. It’s the sort only Hollywood can dream up.
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