The Oscars 2025: Nostalgia Won’t Save Us

Last week, Amherst Cinema announced its plans to shut down its studio theater and decrease its showtimes, enacting cost-saving measures after three straight years of deficits. Even five years after the pandemic’s onset, the theater’s sales are still 20% below pre-pandemic numbers, an ill omen for our beloved local gathering space and nonprofit center for the arts.

It isn’t just small, independent theaters like Amherst Cinema that are in trouble, however. Movie theaters are slowly and steadily shutting down across the country — the number of movie tickets sold has decreased by over 50% in the past two decades. People no longer want to leave the convenience of their homes and pay $12 for a movie ticket when they can access thousands of movies on Netflix with the press of a button.

The pandemic certainly didn’t improve the situation. In 2021, AMC released a much-lampooned commercial starring Nicole Kidman to encourage customers to return to the movies. It went viral less due to its earnest plea for audiences to return to theaters and more due to its inclusion of meme-worthy lines like, “Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.” But hey, all publicity is good publicity, right?

Last Sunday’s Oscars ceremony, therefore, struck a chord with viewers for its resounding advocacy for theatrical moviegoing. The night’s host, Conan O’Brien, poked fun at our screen-age tendencies by pitching a novel invention midway into the broadcast: “CinemaStreams, a building featuring 800 glued-together smartphones that — wait for it — stream the films for you.” Cue an audience member who asks, “Wait, isn’t this just a movie theater?”

On a more sincere note, when Sean Baker accepted the Best Director award from noted movie theater lover (and owner) Quentin Tarantino, he urged viewers to visit theaters for the “communal experience you simply don’t get at home.” His comment sheds light on an increasingly polarized America: We’ve lost our ability to watch things together.

Of course, it’s not exactly a good sign when the biggest movie-related event of the year has to remind viewers to go out and watch movies, but the Oscars’ outpouring of support for movie theaters came at a welcome moment amid the proliferation of streaming services, short-form video content, and apps that keep us staring at our phones instead of enjoying movies communally on the big screen.

The Oscars continued to harken back to Hollywood’s better years with major wins for indie films “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” and “A Real Pain.” The spotlight on these lower-budget, smaller productions came as a breath of fresh air during a time when it seems like every movie is either a reboot or a blockbuster flop. Even Denis Villeneuve’s staggeringly cinematic “Dune” series — which gained two well-deserved Oscars with “Dune: Part Two” winning Best Sound and Best Visual Effects — isn’t an original product.

The general takeaway from this year’s ceremony seems to be that it was a victory for independent cinema. However, if there was a single victor, it was undeniably Baker, whose film “Anora” took away five Oscars. A pretty astounding feat for an R-rated indie film that, as others have written, the vast majority of Americans haven’t seen. Baker took advantage of his multiple trips to the stage to speak in praise of independent film. He emphasized that he made “Anora” on a miniscule $6 million budget with only 40 crew members.

During his final speech of the night, when “Anora” won Best Picture, Baker concluded the ceremony with a rallying cry: “Long live independent film!"

But is “Anora,” a reverse Cinderella story about a stripper who begins and ends the movie with nothing, truly the triumph of independent film it claims to be? I could write an entire article alone on the worrying implications of the film’s portrayal of sex work (which has already been tackled expertly by Sam Bodrojan for the LA Review of Books), but for the sake of this piece, I’ll try to focus on its implications for independent filmmaking.

As thrilled as I am that any indie film could sweep the Oscars, “Anora” does not portend well for the future of cinema. It isn’t the solution, but a symptom of what Hollywood has become — bloated and unoriginal. Rather than reinventing the time-tested genre of gritty, sordid films about fallen women, it sticks to the same tropes. Although “Anora” has been praised as a sensitive account of sex work, the film only offers a surface-level look at its titular character, Brooklyn-based stripper Ani, played by Mikey Madison.

The film’s name succinctly sums up its attitude toward its female lead. Early in the movie, Madison’s character explains that she prefers to be called “Ani,” yet the film and its male characters insist on calling her Anora. In the scene following the movie’s climax, Igor, played by Yuriy Borisov, a taciturn Russian henchman who serves as Ani’s secondary love interest, tells her he likes the name “Anora” better than “Ani.” Ani says she doesn’t care about his opinion and then accuses him of planning to rape her. In the final scene, inexplicably, when Igor drives Ani back to her apartment, a rude awakening after her brief jaunt with luxury, Ani suddenly climbs on top of him and initiates sex. He tries to kiss her, but she turns away and starts crying.

“Anora” offers no explanation for its ending. But the simplest explanation is that Ani, in her final minutes onscreen, realizes she has internalized her profession. By thanking Igor, the only person who has shown her a modicum of kindness during the film, with her body, she reveals that she can only view sex in transactional terms.

Baker shows Ani through the lens of the men who want to use her and throw her away — beautiful, glittering, and damaged, but not a real person with her own hopes and dreams. We never get to truly know her. In the final scene, the film strips away any last hope for Ani’s redemption. By concluding with a scene in which she is reduced to her body and uses sex as an emotional outlet, the film suggests that she is nothing more than a sex worker.

Many in the media have tried to present Madison’s portrayal of a sex worker as a brave and progressive choice when, really, it’s nothing new. The hooker with a heart of gold is one of Hollywood’s oldest and most exhausted tropes. As Ty Burr notes for The Washington Post, it’s no secret that the Academy has long been infatuated with “women who sell their bodies” — at least seven women have won Best Actress for roles as sex workers. It might have been shocking back in 1976 when 12-year-old Jodie Foster won the award for her performance as a child prostitute in “Taxi Driver,” but “Anora” is late to the game.

My ultimate issue with “Anora” at the Oscars isn’t simply its treatment of its female protagonist — it’s that “Anora” offers nothing new to the canon. It’s not especially provocative, as it follows a long tradition of gratuitous movies about strippers and prostitutes, but it’s not subversive either. Despite Baker’s cries for sex work to be destigmatized, he doesn’t challenge any stereotypes in the film.

The Oscars’ recognition of “Anora” and other independent films, nonetheless, is promising amid the industry’s precipitous decline into AI-generated scripts and endless cookie-cutter Netflix originals. It’s too bad that “Anora” wasn’t more inventive. Baker’s previous four movies about sex workers (if anything, he’s consistent) were much more willing to challenge Hollywood norms, but it was this edginess that made them less palatable during awards seasons.

Bizarrely, despite all the time spent hailing “Anora” as a bold, independent film, the Oscars missed its opportunity to properly pay respect to a true trailblazer: David Lynch, who passed away in January. Although the ceremony featured an extended tribute to the James Bond franchise, starring Margaret Qualley from “The Substance” in a lengthy ballroom dance performance (not aerobics), it spared only a brief moment honoring the visionary director.

Lynch’s mindbending films often center troubled women in neon-lit American dreamscapes, much like “Anora” — a prom queen hiding a dark secret, a tormented lounge singer, an aspiring actress with amnesia. But unlike Baker’s Ani, Lynch’s female characters are complex, inscrutable creatures that take on lives of their own. They cannot be reduced to tired, two-dimensional archetypes.

Lynch’s unmistakable cinematic style (so distinct that it spawned its own term), with its lush, hallucinatory images of Americana, forever altered the landscape of filmmaking. The director continues to be cited by cast and crew members alike as the blueprint for filmmakers, the ultimate inspiration. Although films like “Mulholland Drive” put the independent films lauded at the 2025 Oscars to shame, Lynch only ever received two nominations for Best Director, finally earning an honorary Oscar in 2019. It’s jarring, to say the least, to consider the five Oscars “Anora” received in comparison.

As heartening as it is to see independent films celebrated at the Oscars, “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” and “A Real Pain” are not revolutionary works — they haven’t revamped or even revived the world of moviemaking. It doesn’t say much that they triumphed over blockbusters at the awards ceremony when the competition was “Wicked.”

Sentimental nods to a bygone era of the silver screen may feel reassuring in our dark political climate, but Hollywood needs something entirely new. Not a replica of Lynch, but someone who can rival him.