Oscar 2025: A Not-So-Wicked Evening as ‘Anora’ wins five awards
The Oscars proved a lot of things Sunday night, among them, sometimes you can never tell which way the voting will go, and Adam Sandler should never be allowed anywhere near this show again!
His screaming bit during host Conan O’Brien’s opening monologue was the low point of an otherwise very satisfying evening.
Amid a chaotic time for the world at large, the 97th Annual Academy Awards were a generally calm affair. There were moments to honor the bravery of those battling the wildfires, and only slight nods to those outraged by the presidency of Donald Trump, and in the middle was one of the best Oscar shows in at least a decade.
Anora, a tiny independent drama about a sex worker who marries an uber-rich client purely out of love and then battles his family who want to force an annulment won four awards including Best Picture; Mikey Madison, the film’s star won for Best Actress over the expected veteran Demi Moore for The Substance; The director Sean Baker won for Film Editing, Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture as one of the producers – he is the first ever to do that.
The film’s chief competition was three and a half hour brobdingnagian epic The Brutalist which snagged Adrien Brody a second Best Actor award as a Hungarian holocaust survivor who comes to America and whose talents as an architect are celebrated and then exploited. This was Brody’s second Best Actor Oscar, he previously won in 2002 for playing another holocaust survivor in The Pianist. The film was expected to be a major player, but in a year of mass distribution, it came away with three Oscars; one for Brody and then for the film’s score and cinematography.
Audience favorite Wicked won two awards for Production Design and for Costume Design wherein winner Paul Tazewell became the first black man to win in the category.
The controversial drama Emilia Perez, which had drawn ire because of its origins and its use of AI also won two awards; for Best Original Song for “El Mal” and for Zoe Saldana as Best Supporting Actress. Saldana noted in her speech the she is the first women an Dominican decent to win an Oscar.
Kieran Culkin settled a bet with his wife after winning Best Supporting Actor for Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain that she would give him a fourth child if he won.
Mainly, the Oscars kept things light. There was a wide distribution among the winners, and despite a wobbly performance, host Conan O’Brien kept things moving. He was funny when the show needed it, save for a needless “I won’t waste time” number that opened the show and Sandler’s nonsense. And he was solemn when the show needed it too, giving a heartfelt thanks to those fighting the fires.
The usual In Memorium segment is already drawing fire for leaving out actress Michelle Trachtenberg who died last week, as well as Candyman star Tony Todd; Lord of the Rings and Titanic star Bernard Hill; Romeo and Juliet star Olivia Hussey; and French actor Alain Delon. Trachtenberg died a day before Gene Hackman who was remembered before and after the segment.
But the biggest surprise of the night was that very little of the show was directly pointed at the United States’ chief executive. With so much chaos over Trump’s policies and machinations, the chief executive mainly stayed off the show. And that’s part of the tone. This Oscar show was about giving us a break from the bad news of the world and reminding us of the pure joy of movies.
About the Author: Jerry Roberts
Jerry Roberts is a film critic and operator of two websites, Armchair Cinema and Armchair Oscars. 
