Why Does Everyone Hate ‘Anora’?

Online sentiment for films that win the Best Picture Oscar almost always starts to sour the second the Academy hands out the award is— Oppenheimer didn’t feature a Japanese character, so it must be pro-war; Everything Everywhere All At Once was always cringe; CODA was mid; Nomadland didn’t explicitly say “Amazon is bad” so it must not be on the side of the workers it depicts, and so on.

But this year’s Best Picture winner, Sean Baker’s Anora, has experienced some truly deranged levels of online discourse, and it started way before it picked up awards for five of its six Oscar nominations.

The film is about Anora (she goes by Ani), a Brighton Beach erotic dancer and sex worker who marries to a customer who happens to be the failson of a Russian oligarch. When her new husband’s parents find out about the nuptials, they send enforcers to annul the marriage and send their son back to Russia. The film is equal parts rom-com, screwball comedy and Uncut Gems, and like much of Baker’s work, is about the struggles of making a living on the margins in America.

Back in December, Mikey Madison made headlines for saying she refused an intimacy coordinator for the film’s sex scenes, saying “It was a choice that I made.” This led to some online calling Baker “sleazy” for asking if Madson wanted an intimacy coordinator instead of making it mandatory, while others praised Madison for doing what she thought was best for her.

When Criterion announced the upcoming 4K Blu-Ray for Anora, this tweet from @delphicbitch made the rounds. The user has since deactivated their account, but people (like us) are still sharing the post via screenshots.

“now that Anora — ha!ha! The name she hates being called — is on DVD and blu-ray, you can own her too, in a sexually available looking blu-ray where you can leer at her over and over in the privacy of your own home,” the post says. This is in reference to the cover featuring Anora wearing nothing but boots and a red scarf, in homage to Vampyros Lesbos, a film Baker said is an influence on Anora.

Discourse about that died down until the Oscars last week. It’s rare for a movie to get hate from both sides of the political spectrum, but that’s what happened after Anora’s Best Picture win.

A 2020 blog post from Vinyl Writers about how playing a prostitute is a sure path to Oscar glory (as seen with Madison this year) and a website called OscarHookers.com was cited in a tweet about Anora’s win:

Multiple comments on the YouTube video for Anora’s trailer talk about how the film didn’t deserve to win, that it “wouldn’t have even been nominated” decades ago because of its subject matter, that it normalizes prostitution, and that it’s just a new version of “Pretty Woman.”

One article in the Guardian says the film glorifies Russia at a time when the United States should be distancing itself from the country; indeed, Russian state propagandists held up the film’s many wins as a triumph. Best Supporting Actor nominee Yura Borisov, who plays the sensitive enforcer Igor, has previously starred in Russian propaganda films

On the other side, many sex workers have taken issue with the film, saying: “We didn’t see any of, like, who she is really as a person. We only saw her in a work context” and that the film is actually about an incredibly privileged person: “For a young, white, privileged sex worker who speaks English and probably has an American passport, [so has] many levels of privilege, it’s possibly very accurate.”

One poster took issue with Anora herself, saying that the movie is bad because “the girl we meet at the beginning of the film would not commit so heavily into that relationship.”

Then there’s Baker’s perceived personal politics. He follows some pro-Israel accounts on social media, which led some to want to cancel him for Zionism, despite him not speaking publicly about anything to do with Israel or Hamas.

Baker has gone on the record saying he thinks sex work should be “decriminalized and not in any way regulated, because it’s a sex worker’s body and it’s up to them to decide how they will use it in their livelihood.”

At the end of the day, movies have the power to show us lives we know nothing about and can cause us to empathize with the plights of folks we may never meet. Depiction often does not equal endorsement, and no one movie can be everything to everyone.

Just don’t show any of these people Baker’s film Red Rocket. Don’t think we’d ever recover from the takes on that one.