The Year When Oscar Narratives Ate the Oscars

The Oscars have long been called a “horse race,” and in any such contest the horses are bound to shift position. One horse can pull ahead, and then fall behind. That said, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a switchback Oscar moment quite like the one that took place on Feb. 8, the day that the Directors and Producers Guilds both bestowed their top honors on “Anora,” Sean Baker’s acclaimed tale of a sex worker who makes fast work of marrying a Russian oligarch’s wastrel son, only to see the fireworks fly when his parents find out.

As soon as “Anora” nabbed those two awards, the film’s fate looked sealed. It was declared the instant and overwhelming front-runner for best picture. (A week later, when the Writers Guild gave its best original screenplay award to “Anora,” that was the cherry on top.) Yet what was strange about this reconfiguring of stakes is that it simply brought “Anora” to the very front-runner status you’d assumed it would have occupied all along.

From the moment last May when “Anora” set critics’ hearts aflutter and took the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the film has been the darling of darlings. Yet after originally being tagged as a heavyweight best-picture contender, it dropped out of that conversation; after all the acclaim, it was deemed too indie, not “major” enough. For the last four months, the chatter about best picture has been focused almost entirely on “The Brutalist” and “Emilia Pérez,” with “A Complete Unknown” coming up the side.

But after “Emilia Pérez” appeared to be KO’d by the Karla Sofía Gascón tweetstorm imbroglio, the moment was ripe for another horse. And thus spoke “Anora,” the little front-runner that could. All of which makes this the perfect up-and-down-and-then-up-again roller-coaster saga for an Oscar season in which narratives haven’t just been part of the story. They’ve become the story. In fact, 2024/25 may go down as the…