A poor man's Sean Baker movie

Although director Gia Coppola comes from a family lineage of a very different sort of filmmaking -- several different sorts of filmmaking within one family, I should say, this one probably most resembling her aunt Sofia -- the person most responsible for the look and feel of The Last Showgirl may be the man who just won all the Oscars this past year. (When The Last Showgirl also might have been up for an Oscar, if the campaign to get Pamela Anderson nominated had had legs.)

That's right, I'm not sure if we would have The Last Showgirl without Sean Baker.

As you would know if you've followed Baker's career -- or read this post -- Baker loves him some movies about sex workers. I don't know if you would actually call what Anderson's Shelly does for her career "sex work," but she's a Vegas showgirl whose breasts are bared during her Rockettes-like act. She's selling sex if not actually giving it, and it becomes clear that any equivalent replacement career she'd have, if her show were to be shut down (which it is in the course of this narrative), would be selling sex a lot more.

Then there's the fact that reference is made to the fact that she could be (but isn't) one of those showgirls who hustles on the side -- in other words, is available for "bonus activities" for a particular sort of fan who waits at the stage door after the show. She actually does have a possible interest in one such fan, never seen on screen, which is why the subject comes up at all.

It might feel even more like a Baker film -- particularly Baker's last film, the one that won all the Oscars -- because Anora also spends time in Las Vegas, the setting for Coppola's film. Of course, since the movies were released within only a few months of each other, that's just a coincidence, because of course it is.

Though the thing that really cemented the Baker connection for me, after I'd already made the initial connection with the sex work theme, was the way it's shot. I was reminded a bit of Baker's The Florida Project, which has a lot of external shots of characters in an around hotels and establishments on busy commercial or industrial thoroughfares. They share a dreamy indie sensibility that Baker did not pioneer, but may have helped bring to greater prominence. 

If we are taking about The Last Showgirl relative to Anora specifically, I have a comparison between the two films that might surprise you. I definitely think Anora is the superior film, but not by the margin you might expect. And it all comes down to how Baker and Coppola have chosen to develop, or not develop, their main character.

Whether he meant to or not, I feel like Baker left his titular character as a bit of a cypher. We spend a lot of time with Anora -- she's in practically every scene -- but all that time has not allowed us to get to know her any better. I kind of think that was an intentional choice by Baker, not an oversight, but that doesn't mean it worked any better for me. The distance I felt from Anora prevented me from getting on board with the movie to the same extent other people did.

With Shelly, screenwriter Kate Gersten has done a much better job of rounding out her history, and has not had to hit us over the head to do it. That also means that Gersten and Coppola's film is more conventional in some ways, since it really is Screenwriting 101 to give your main character a back story, past traumas that come back to haunt her, an estranged daughter, that sort of thing. We get all that for Shelly, and Anderson's performance -- which I initially wasn't sure about -- really helps sell it. 

If it makes me a basic bitch for preferring this approach to Baker's intentional deviation from it, well then, a basic bitch I am. 

Lucky #26

When I said that was it for Oscars talk, I meant it ... but then after going to bed I thought of a couple things that I hadn't fit into my hurried reactions post. (Plus, it's not like I've been talking your ear off about the Oscars. In fact, they barely got a mention on this blog after I initially reacted to the nominations.)

Whichever film finishes 2025 as my 26th favorite movie of the year, they should feel happy, because it means they've got a good shot at winning best picture.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that Anora was my #26 of 2024 ... but so too was Oppenheimer my #26 of 2023.

It's a recent phenomenon for sure. If I glance over the other best picture winners since I started ranking my movies in 1996, they fall into three categories: much higher than #26 (I've had three #1s win best picture, which are Titanic, Birdman and Parasite), much lower than #26 (Nomadland was #82, Green Book was #69), or not seen at all by the time of the awards (12 Years a Slave and CODA, both of which I could not see in time to rank them). 

Number 26 is an interesting middle ground. It acknowledges that I think the film is good, maybe even very good, but there are usually at least a handful of best picture nominees I like better. This year, there were seven, as I had a whopping six in my top ten. Only A Complete Unknown did I dislike more, if you want to put it in the negative rather than the positive sense. (I still haven't seen I'm Still Here.)

But there's also a kind of message to it, whether intentional or not, and I appear to have been sending that message to both Oppenheimer and Anora. The top 25 makes an interesting cutoff, or at least, I think of it that way because my friend who does the ranking exercise with me used to highlight his top 25 before sending his whole list. He's scaled that back to his top 20 now, but the line of demarcation between #25 and #26 still feels like it means something. And to the extent that I apply intentionality to anything I do with my bigger list, making a movie #26 says to me "I get this movie is respected, and I liked it quite a lot too, but I have problems with it."

Apparently, that is the type of movie that wins best picture.

Since we own Anora, my wife is going to watch it this weekend when I'm out of town. So we'll see what she thinks.

A Complete shutout

Only two best picture nominees did not pick up a single Oscar: Nickel Boys, my #10, which wasn't nominated in enough categories to have a real chance, and A Complete Unknown, which received eight nominations ... and won not a one of them.

Sweet, sweet justice.

You may remember that I did not care for A Complete Unknown. It was my 128th ranked movie of the year, out of 177. Granted, it was also the last movie I ranked. But I don't know if my opinion would have improved significantly if I'd been given more time to think about it. Maybe 119th. 

So like what happened a couple years ago when The Fabelmans, which I also did not like, didn't win anything, I'm feeling like a necessary correction occurred here. I was bracing for Timothee Chalamet to win the best actor statue, and although I tend to prefer when the wealth is shared for Oscars, meaning I would have supported that win, I'd much rather have the (better) work by Adrien Brody recognized, even if means his second turn in that spotlight.

Then there were three nominations for ACU, other than best picture, that I thought were completely unwarranted: best supporting actress for Monica Barbaro, best supporting actor for Edward Norton, and best director for James Mangold. All of those were long shots and none of them happened.

Anyway, as I said, justice prevailed against a very overrated movie.

My personal scorecard

Although, as usual, I didn't pay much attention to the pre-Oscars discourse on likely winners (though I did pay some), and, as usual, I made my selections just before the show (actually after it had already ended, but I had seen no results), I did quite well on my picks this year, picking 15 of the 23 categories correctly. And that's even without guessing any of the random ones (the shorts) correctly to help boost my score. So it was 15 out of 20 on any categories I had a reasonable chance of getting correct, which is better than I've done in a long, long time.

My only really big miss: best actress. And this one stings a bit. I felt like I really had a dog in that race this year, and Demi Moore losing to someone like Mikey Madison, who is like 23 years old, just seems a bit of a travesty of the normal rules of Oscar fairness. Moore will never get another shot. I feel a bit how I felt when Bill Murray and Mickey Rourke, who were both nominated as best actor for my #1 movie that year, both lost Oscars to Sean Penn ... speaking of two-time winners. 

Anora honored

When I first heard all the buzz about Anora, I thought, "Wow. Well, Sean Baker has been making good films for a long time now." (A few exceptions aside. *ahem* Red Rocket *ahem*)

Then I saw it, and though I liked it (my #26 of last year), it did not really seem like best picture material. Not in filmmaking quality, but in subject matter. 

Oscar voters thought differently, and Anora cleaned up. Even Mikey Madison won. In fact, only Yura Borisov missed. Anora won in every other category where it was nominated. 

Interestingly, I own this film, as I had to buy it in order to fit it into the best available viewing slot between Christmas and New Year's. So, whenever I want, I can watch it again to see what I (sort of) missed. 

Now, on to my thoughts, recorded in real time as I was watching, which is maybe not the best way to do it. (But makes it easier to remember and to publish more quickly.)

This post is not going to receive any Oscars for best editing as I am leaving in all the thoughts I wrote down while watching the show, even though they are boring. Enjoy! 

 - My 11-year-old is starting out on the couch with me, which is nice -- and which makes me feel bad that I couldn't start watching until 20 minutes after I got home from playing tennis.

- I thought my son might be nonplussed by Cynthia Erivo's bald appearance, but he did not mention it. Glad I'm raising a good one. 

- I liked Wicked as much as the next guy -- it was my #2 of the year -- but the opening was a bit long. 

- The orchestra is in the sky! Interesting. I dig it. (Rather literally defying gravity.)

- Conan coming out of Demi. Good one. 

- Missed a joke from Conan because my son is asking me questions. Worth it. 

- The thing at the back of the stage looks like a Marvel superhero's breast plate.

- Yes, my son was still sitting there for Conan's orgasm joke. Just one of the reasons the opening monologue could have been 40% shorter. 

- Okay, I am officially dying now. We're 22 minutes in and there has not been an award announced yet.

- 24:50 - "Without further delay, let's get started." Well, nope. The time-wasting song is the last nail in my coffin. 

- Edward Norton's wrinkles have wrinkles.

- "Going long disorder" is apparently contagious. Robert Downey Jr. and Kieran Culkin have contracted it. 

- Andrew Garfield fawning over Goldie Hawn continues the feeling of excess. I don't know if I can continue mentioning all these things. 

- Is Nick Offerman the Oscars announcer?

- The woman who won the best animated short is adorable. But why is her co-director reading the thing she's already said? There really are no controls on the length of this show.

- I like the idea of giving extensive praise to people like the costume designers, but not the reality of it. 

- (I just dared look it up while potentially risking exposing myself to the spoilers. Yes it's Nick Offerman.)

- (And another lengthy bit with Conan has made this abundantly clear.)

- Until now I did not know what Sean Baker looked like. Thanks, Sean, for giving a professional speech and trying to bring this unwieldy beast back on track.

- The June Squibb Bill Skarsgard bit was funny.

- Well my #1 of 2024 gets at least one Oscar. Indeed, my viewing on Friday confirmed for me how good the makeup was in The Substance. And, I guess, the hair, or sometimes, lack thereof. 

- Halle Berry is not 60 years old. She is not. (It's true. She's only 58.) But is now really the time for a random Bond tribute? And what does Margaret Qualley have to do with it?

- Oh no, the Bond tribute is going into its second song. I really should not have waited 20 minutes after getting home from tennis to start watching. 

- If Baker also wins as director, that'll be some kind of record. Different tone from his first speech but still under budget (quick and funny). 

- Da'Vine Joy is giving Robert Downey a lesson on how this should have been done.

- Glad Emilia Perez (my #4) did not get shut out. Saldana was great in it and I loved her heartfelt acceptance speech.

- Ben Stiller, star of past Oscar bits (remember when he was dressed as a Na'vi?), pulls off a good one here. 

- Mick Jagger is more alive than I thought he'd be. 

- "El Mal" wins. Take that, everyone who thought the music in Emilia Perez was bad. (And nice shoutout to the presenter in their acceptance speech. Probably thought of that on the way up to the stage.)

- My stream of the Oscars, which crapped out during one of the ad breaks, is starting to skip the ads for some reason. Thank goodness for small miracles.

- Now that the show has picked up its pace, I don't mind the musical sand worm as much as I did the first time.

- Nice to get the best of both Palestine and Israel in one acceptance speech. Samuel L. loved it when the Israeli delivered a broadside to the Trump administration.

- Good bit with the firefighters. Worked. Is this show saving itself? Just a little?

- The third sound winner ate nothing but orchestra. Thanks for the number about wasting time, Conan.

- Is Gal Gadot really tall or is Rachel Zeigler really short?

- The late announcement of these technical awards makes it seem like Dune is gathering momentum. It is not. (Scarier realization: It's not actually that late in the show.)

- What is "Ovation Hollywood"?

- Ana de Armas pronounced "robot" like "robutt," which is how Dr. Zoidberg says it on Futurama. (Also, this means I was officially shut out on the "random guess" categories of live action short, documentary short and animated short.)

- Best conceived "in memoriam" in a while. 

- Does Lol Crowley get sick of people asking him if he's laughing out loud?

- Okay, Conan's zing of Trump via Anora finally has me on his side.

- I had started to hear that Timothee Chalamet was going to win best actor, but went against that and picked Adrien Brody. And that happened. And while I never really thought of Brody as someone who would win two Oscars, he deserved it. Great thoughtful speech, too -- a bit long. So winning twice earns you extra time?

- Christopher Nolan CBF to show up and present best director.

- Yep, this post is getting a picture of Sean Baker. I certainly know what he looks like now. 

- Oh no. Demi didn't win. Biggest upset of the evening so far?

- Nice to see Billy Crystal on stage after he lost his house in Pacific Palisades, the one where he had lived since the 1970s. And Meg Ryan looked better than I feared.

- As was obvious by this point, Anora wins.

Well that's it everybody. It's after 1 a.m. even though the show finished around 3 p.m. my time. And now I must sleep.

No problem money can't solve

In Anora, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) has a problem. Despite having access to riches beyond anyone's wildest dreams, he's got a finite visa that will prevent his preferred indefinite stay in New York. He's got to go back to Russia unless he can solve this problem.

Also in Anora, Ani (Mikey Madison) has a problem. She lives in a squalid apartment with a disagreeable roommate, and only sex work in a nearby strip club can afford her even this meager existence. Since the strip club does not provide her health insurance and a 401K, she'll have to keep working there under a work schedule of their choosing unless she can solve this problem.

A certain sum of money can solve both their problems. For Vanya, it's the amount of money necessary to make Ani his girlfriend for a week, which includes enough lavish living to tempt her into a marriage that can get him a green card. For Ani it's the same amount of money, but really, it's never having to think about money again after she's the wife of the son of a Russian oligarch -- and certainly never having to work at the strip club again.

I also had a problem I needed to solve, and money -- a much smaller amount of money -- was also the solution.

I'm looking at less than three weeks to see about 20 more movies I want to/expect to see before I close off my 2024 rankings. Some of these are movies I can scrounge up on rental, streaming or the plane ride back to Melbourne. Most are not.

In fact, my list of unseen "important" end of year awards contenders just released or not yet released in either the US or Australia includes, or up until recently included, the following, listed alphabetically:

Anora
The Brutalist 
A Complete Unknown 
Conclave
The Nickel Boys
Nightbitch 
Nosferatu 
Queer 
A Real Pain 
Sing Sing

Possibly all of these movies will be available in theaters in Los Angeles. I can't say for sure and will be able to check with a clearer head when I get there later today. But even so I will get to see at most two of them before we leave on Saturday night.

Then some others will be available in Australian cinemas after I return, but again, I'll only be able to prioritize three at most in what will then be 11 days before my deadline.

So on Sunday night, our second and final night staying outside San Jose with hosts who go to bed early, I needed to fit in one of these titles available on iTunes -- even if it meant I had to throw money at the problem to make it go away.

The choices were Conclave and Anora, both of which would cost me $19.99 to own. No option to rent, though I would have happily paid that same price to do so. 

As you know from this post, I don't like to buy movies via digital purchase -- even ones I know and love, but especially those I've never seen. But I also like to make problems go away, especially at this time of year.

Conclave had the benefit of being 18 minutes shorter, and as the movie I thought I might like less, I was less worried about the less optimal viewing environment of the child's bedroom we've overtaken the last two nights while we've been staying here. (It's actually the guest bedroom, but she's informally moved into it because she no longer wants to share a room with her eight-year-old brother, three years her junior.)

However, I was also taking the long view here, a logical approach when it comes to permanent ownership. Sean Baker has made two movies that made my year-end top ten, while Edward Berger has only made a remake of All Quiet on the Western Front to which I was rather indifferent (that I've seen, anyway).

The clincher for Anora, though, was that there was no future rental date visible for this movie on iTunes, while Conclave will be available to rent on January 10th, a full week before my deadline -- possibly even at the lower rental price of $5.99 or $6.99. And while both will be available in Australian cinemas when I return, I shouldn't be watching either that way given that there will be other titles on the above list where I'll only have the theatrical, not the iTunes, option.

So for the second time this week I added a movie I haven't seen to my permanent iTunes library. Hey, it's that time of year.

Repeat viewings of Anora will probably be somewhat unlikely, but that's all I'll say about it until I post my rankings -- though there will also likely be a review posted in the next few days, linked to the right, if you want to know my thoughts. That was another problem I solved by buying Anora -- the movie, not the person like Vanya did -- which is that I wanted to write and post one more review before returning to Australia, and it needed to be a movie already released there. Anora qualified in that regard as well.

I've heard the phrase "mo money mo problems," but never any musical contemplation of the problems the small sum of $19.99 can solve.

Sean Baker is so predictable

I saw The Substance on Friday and I really, really liked it. I'm not going to go into any detail now, because there may be more to say about this film in my year-end top ten. May be? Will be.

But I've been thinking about it enough that I was drawn to a mention of it in an email from KCRW, which I still get even though I don't live in Los Angeles anymore. 

The email mentioned that the movie was in contention for this year's Palme d'Or at Cannes, but lost out to Sean Baker's Anora.

Without knowing anything about Anora or having ever even heard of it before -- yes, I guess I'm not as up on my Cannes news as I should be -- I said to myself, "Oh this must be Sean Baker's latest movie about sex workers." Thinking that I was making a joke, because surely Baker would branch out at some point.

And yet when I went to IMDB, I cracked myself up not seven words into the movie's logline, which starts: "Anora, a young sex worker from Brooklyn ..."

I didn't need to keep reading.

Now don't get me wrong. I like Baker's work. "Love" might be too strong a word, especially after the disappointment that was Red Rocket, but he's a two-time top ten finisher in my year-end rankings with Tangerine and The Florida Project. Starlet probably wouldn't have made my top ten if I'd seen it in time to rank it that year, but I really liked that film, too.

But if I'm going to give Guy Ritchie a hard time for remaking the same gangster movie over and over again, why does Baker get off the hook just for being more artsy?

And at least Guy Ritchie made some random Disney movies like Aladdin, not to mention two Sherlock Holmes movies. Baker has never made a movie that did not have a sex worker in it, usually starring in it. 

Is it enough to earn Baker, a highly respected director for good reason, my snark?

The answer is, evidently, yes.

Though maybe it wouldn't be if I hadn't really disliked the last sex worker movie, Red Rocket. Until that point, I thought Sean Baker could do not wrong. But he did wrong. It was just too long and too much Simon Rex being a total knob.

The thing is, it is almost like Baker is pathologically not embarrassed about this proclivity. 

As a person who likes to daydream that I might write a book someday, I always think about things I might talk about in that book, and it wouldn't be any good unless I went into some sordid territory. But then I always think "Well, I don't really want my parents to read that" or "Well, I don't really want my kids to read that." I still have one parent left, hopefully for at least another decade but possibly a lot longer, and I hope to have two kids still around until long after I'm gone. So if I'm really worried about exposing any secrets I might have -- or really, making anybody even think the things I write about might stem from personal knowledge of embarrassing things -- then I'll just never write about those things.

Baker is my opposite in that regard. He doesn't give a flying flip if anyone thinks he's been with hundreds of prostitutes. I suspect he hasn't, but his fascination with these people as dramatic figures, as protagonists, has to have some sort of origin. I mean, it's clear from his films that he is interested in downtrodden Americans, but do they always have to be sex workers?

Today, as I was going back to get the exact wording of the Anora logline in order to write this post, I finally read the rest of it.

"Anora, a young sex worker from Brooklyn, meets and impulsively marries the son of an oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairytale is threatened as the parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled."

Well if I were worried about Baker branching out, this calms my fears a bit. This whole Russian oligarch angle is something distinctly new in his filmography, and maybe it will bear fruit. It even sounds like another further step into the world of comedy that he only first explored with Red Rocket -- not successfully there, but perhaps here.

And if it doesn't turn out to be branching out, after all?

Well, Baker does make more good sex worker movies than bad ones.