As of writing, Anora’s Oscar Best Picture win is only a few days old and yet Film Twitter is incredibly upset by this outcome. As someone who has been following this years Awards season, I’m slightly shocked by this uproar. Part of the reason Anora was expected to win Best Picture months ago, was in part due to it being the most well liked of all the potential contenders. Anora had won the Palme D’or at Cannes Film Festival and then followed that up with a runner-up spot for the People’s Choice Award at Toronto Film Festival, a feat last achieved by Parasite. It wasn’t just its festival success either, Anora had at one point a 4.2 average rating on Letterboxd, it was above a 90 on both Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, and was circling an 8.0 on IMDB. Even as of writing it’s still maintaining high scores on all of these websites, which just leaves us with the question of why are so many people so angry that this won as many Oscars as it did?

So to partly come to terms with why so many people have turned on Anora, we have to first look at a previous best picture winner that had a similar reaction to Anora, this being Everything Everywhere all at Once. Part of the narrative for Everything Everywhere winning best picture was down to it being the most beloved film of 2022. Upon its release Everything Everywhere quickly shot up to become the highest rated film on letterboxd, before going on to appear on, and top the most, critics top ten lists at the end of the year (a feat that Anora also achieved). Just like Anora, Everything Everywhere was the critics pick of that year, winning the most critics groups for best picture and then winning best picture at the Critics Choice awards. Everything Everywhere was a film that gained momentum due to how much people loved it, and yet after it won best picture people started to turn on it.

However, I do think that there’s a difference in the ways that people turned on both films. The consensus on Everything Everywhere from the people that don’t like it is that it’s way too much and very annoying, with Anora it seems to be in various different directions but most of them seem to come back to the presentation of sex in the film, and Sean Baker as a person. Now, I will admit that criticism of Anora has existed since its premiere at Cannes, and the common criticisms tended to reflect on the way Baker chose to tell the story, and the character of Anora. While, as a fan of the film these are criticisms that I’d personally disagree with, I think they’re perfectly valid conclusions to come to. However, the newer criticisms seem to be pulled from out of nowhere. One article from USA Today, describes Anora as a safe choice for the Academy, and while its not as unconventional a winner as something like The Substance would be, it feels odd to describe Anora as safe. The Kings Speech, Green Book and Coda are typical safe picks, Anora doesn’t really fall into that category. If we’re to go over to Twitter then we’ll see a lot of the criticism focus on the presentation of Sex in the film. This includes the website Oscarhookers being created to demonstrate the Academy’s bias to sex work related roles, people accusing both this film and Poor Things of being basically porn, and people going through Sean Baker’s social media to prove that he’s a got bad politics. Now firstly, the uproar about the amount of sex in Anora feels a bit regressive and the creation of oscarhookers just adds on to that for me. It just feels like a way to degrade women for being in sex scenes and feels like a horrific side effect of conservatives dominating the conversation on social issues, via their culture wars. I also feel like the Sean Baker stuff is a bit odd. I’d say that both his filmography and his admiration of filmmakers like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach is enough for me to assume that he’s not a conservative. (The IDF babes thing is a bit odd though)

Maybe, I’m just biased from my love of Anora, but this hate storm that’s went its way has felt way too overblown for me. Its fine to not like Anora, its fine to be upset that your favourite film didn’t win awards , but this Anora hate fest feels like its become an even bigger thing than the fall out of the Will Smith/Chris Rock slap thing. A $6 Million indie made by the guy who directed Tangerine and The Florida Project has swept the Oscars and yet judging by the reactions you’d think that Emilia Perez had. It’s great to be passionate about films, but hopefully people will be more normal about whatever wins next year.