2 w. ago
The Oscars were an exhilarating triumph for Anora and newly minted star Mikey Madison
Political metaphors were the dark undercurrent in this year’s crop, from Anora’s toxic masculinity to the revolutionary defiance of I’m Still HereSo, as Conan O’Brien pointed out, the Oscars went to a film about someone standing up to a Russian, and maybe recent events mean we have to probe its political metaphor even further. Sean Baker’s cacophonous, crazy non-love story Anora won five Academy Awards including best actress for that rather amazing and newly born star Mikey Madison, playing the tough, smart, beautiful New York lap dancer who gets a Vegas quickie marriage to the spoilt and pusillanimous son of a Russian oligarch and then has to stand up to his parents. Madison embodies Anora’s complex courage: not exactly romantic, not exactly in love, but certainly believing in the wedding contract, in her own status as a legally married woman and in the possibility of happiness which is no more remote for her than for anyone else. She is the thoroughly modern, thoroughly 21st-centu...
Politics
