Anora was the big winner at the 97th Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday.
The independent, Neon-distributed film, directed by Sean Baker, took home the biggest award of the evening with best picture. It also won best actress, best director, best editing and best original screenplay.
After the ceremony, Baker and the film’s star, Mikey Madison, spoke to press backstage about how surreal it was for the film to have won five Oscars.
“I never thought anything like this would happen in my life,” Madison said. “I love making movies and I’ve dreamed of being an actress that would be able to be in a film like Anora my entire career as an actress. It’s a huge honor, one that I think will soak in later down the line, hopefully.”
The film follows a young sex worker from Brooklyn who marries the son of a Russian oligarch after a whirlwind romance. While speaking to press after his four Oscar wins, Baker said he thinks sex work should be decriminalized.
“It’s our oldest profession, yet it has an incredible, unfair stigma applied to it,” Baker said. “What I’ve been trying to do with my films is sort of chip away at that very unfair stigma. Personally, I think it should be decriminalized, and I guess through my work, through hopefully humanizing my characters that are usually seen as perhaps caricatures in most film and television, it will help do that.”
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