Director Sean Baker has been a critic favorite for years with movies like The Florida Project, Red Rocket, and Tangerine, but with Anora. Baker has the opportunity to be certified as one of the best directors of the era with a win at the 97th Academy Awards on March 2.

Anora has taken off as a front runner for best picture after an award season filled with unpredictability, which is in sharp contrast to the last award season where Oppenheimer dominated the best picture talk all year. But what exactly makes Anora so special compared to the other nominations?

According to Jordan Ruimy of World of Reel , Baker has built a reputation of being a “gutter poet” who platforms groups and communities that are not appreciated or ignored by society.

Anora follows a female performer named Anora (Mikey Madison), or Ani as she prefers to be called, who meets the rich son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn) and marries him after a week of partying in Las Vegas. When the Russian media finds out, chaos ensues and the plot unravels.

The movie is romantic, devastating, hilarious reimagining of the Cinderella fairytale and at the heart of all of it is the incredible performance from Mikey Madison. She commands the screen with her presence and electricity, her mood dictates how the audience feels, and she is able to make you laugh or cry at the drop of a hat. She woe’s you in the first frame and makes you think deeply by the final frame.

The world is not composed of one genre, Ani has her knight in shining armor appear in the first 10 minutes of the film and the whirlwind romance begins, unlike most other fairy tales, this one is interrupted with a hard dose of reality. Baker films to demonstrate how different real life is compared to what we see from the romance between Ani and Ivan.

The movie becomes dark, loud, and chaotic, which is how the real world feels. As the film progresses, the only thing Ani has in common with Cinderella is her own version of a glass slipper – her wedding ring – which serves as a plot device that represents the respect and wealth she believes she’s earned by being married to Ivan.

Baker uses the genre from comedy to drama, as a weapon, as the last act turns the audience’s laughs into weeps within minutes. Reality can be a sad thing, and every high eventually has a low, and the viewer has to experience the low head on, and it’s hard to wrap your head around it. Is it heartbreaking? Or heartwarming? Baker leaves that question to the audience when the screen fades to black.
The ending alone is worth the price of admission and earns it’s spot as a modern day classic that should be essential viewing for movie fans.