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 year when Oscar narratives ate the Oscars.  

In the past, there were two basic species of Oscar narrative. The original one, stretching back decades, was the “It’s time!” factor: actors and, on occasion, directors winning Oscars because they’ve been nominated so often and have never won, or are simply well-liked industry warhorses who Academy voters want to honor. Think John Wayne in “True Grit,” Al Pacino in “Scent of a Woman,” or Martin Scorsese winning best director for “The Departed.”

The second kind of Oscar narrative stretches back to the Harvey Weinstein era, since he basically invented it, and that’s the backstabbing negative Oscar campaign: the poisoning of the well with a story about a movie that may, in fact, be true but is pumped up by the media (usually via energized publicists) to ruin that movie’s chances. Prime examples include the campaign against “A Beautiful Mind” based on allegations that its subject, John Nash, was an anti-Semite (it didn’t work), or the pushing of the narrative that “Saving Private Ryan” was a masterpiece manqué that went downhill after the cataclysmic opening sequence (specious as it was, that one did work).  

But Oscar season is now rooted in such a complex interface with the media coverage of it that the narratives are coming at us in a postmodern profusion. If Demi Moore is indeed the front-runner for best actress, it’s not just linked to the “It’s time!” factor but to the very substance of “The Substance” — the shoving aside of female actors in sexist Hollywood once they reach a certain age — and how that theme powerfully projects Moore’s own narrative. Or consider how this year, just about every single best picture contender has been tainted with a negative campaign — not necessarily because there’s some Weinstein figure pulling strings behind the curtain, but because the scolding chatter on social media is now, in effect, the negative trigger.

Thus, “The Brutalist” is guilty of enhancing itself with AI (even though that’s actually true of many of the best picture nominees). “Anora” is guilty of including sex scenes staged without an intimacy coordinator (though the film’s lead actress, Mikey Madison, handled this issue so adroitly that it appears to have faded). And then, of course, there’s the head-twisting scandal of “Emilia Pérez,” with best actress nominee Gascón starting off as a progressive paragon (potentially the first trans winner in that category), only to have her scurrilous tweets reveal her to be the Archie Bunker of trans best actress nominees. All of which just reinforced the eternal narrative about Netflix movies: that a lot of people in the industry don’t want to vote for them.

And how’s this for the ultimate Oscar-narrative twist? The film you’d think would be the quintessential best-picture contender, the crowd-pleasing middlebrow liberal ecclesiastical head-game thriller “Conclave,” spent 95 percent of the season appearing not to stand a chance, precisely because it’s such a quintessential best-picture contender. That doomed it because it was seen as too rote and safe and predictable a choice. Except that now, all of a sudden, it’s the potential mainstream winner we’ve been secretly yearning for. Or something. In the world according to the new Oscar rules, the story a movie is telling is no longer enough. It’s now competing with the story being told about a movie.