Anora’s Fairy Tale is Back on Track

When the Vulture Movies Fantasy League season kicked off back in October, the most rostered movie, by far, was Anora: 35% of participants in our game added the film to their entries. That made sense: It was the Cannes Palme d’Or winner in an era when the Palme has been a reliable indicator of future awards success (Parasite, Anatomy of a Fall). As we looked ahead at a fall season that lacked any heavy-favorite awards contenders, all the enthusiasm surrounding Anora felt right.

Then awards season started, and Anora began to look less like a winner and more like filler for the Best Picture field. The Los Angeles film critics went for it, but both the New York Film Critics Circle (The Brutalist) and the National Board of Review (Wicked) elected otherwise. The evolving narrative seemed to crystalize at the Golden Globes, where Anora went home empty-handed while Emilia Pérez stepped to the front of the line. Even during the Karla Sofia Gascón tweet disaster, awards pundits were gravitating toward movies such as The Brutalist or A Complete Unknown to step into the front-runner role.

Turns out, that 35 percent of MFL players may have had it right this whole time. Last Friday, just when it looked like Anora was going to sit through yet another televised award ceremony without picking up a single trophy, it happened: Best Picture winner at the Critics Choice Awards. Sean Baker’s film beat out five movies that had more nominations (Wicked, Conclave, Dune Part 2, Emilia Pérez, and The Brutalist) and one movie that had the same number (The Substance). A true Brighton Beach underdog story.

Things went from good to great for Anora on Saturday night when, within an hour or so of each other, Baker won the top prize at the Directors Guild Awards and Anora took the Best Picture trophy at the Producers Guild. To put things simply: Those results augur very well for the movie’s Oscar fortunes.

The DGA and PGA are among the most reliable indicators of who will win Best Picture: The PGA has matched Best Picture 12 out of the past 15 years (the span of time since the Oscars expanded the category). During that same period, the DGA’s pick has matched the eventual Best Director winner 13 out of 15 times. And in the 11 instances where the DGA and PGA went to the same movie, only twice has that movie not won Best Picture (2016’s La La Land and 2019’s 1917).

So after an awards season during which we seemed for long stretches to not have a favorite, punctuated by a handful of weeks when we had one of the most problematic front-runners of my lifetime, we settled on the movie we had a hunch about five months ago. Now just three weeks are left for Ani to click-clack those heels over the finish line.

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Here’s the remaining awards season calendar:

WGA Awards: Saturday, February 15

BAFTA Awards: Sunday, February 16

Independent Spirit Awards: Saturday, February 22

SAG Awards: Sunday, February 23

Oscars: Sunday, March 2