Oscar Winners Are Getting Smaller—And That’s a Good Thing

DPutting on who you listen to, as a company, we no longer care about Oscars: films are dead and live streaming products. Or are we too careful about the Oscars – don’t people know there are wars in progress? Do we care, should we worry, is there really something that you want to worry? It now seems that the 2025 edition is in the rear view mirror – a ceremony in which Sean Baker did independently Anora won a total of five Oscars – that many of us care more than we can even admit to ourselves. And it is not because the photos have become larger; This is because they became smaller.

Not so long ago, we knew about an ossarized film when we saw one coming. The King’s speech, 12 years old A slave, Birdman, Green Book: These films were either Tony Prestige products, or in one way or another, we have tried to solve the high social problems that we, as a moviegoer nation, we really worry or claim as we care. Even the minor surprise of a film like The artist Winning the best film had a sense retrospectively: Hollywood has always liked to flatter itself, and a film riffing on its silent past of light was necessarily to find love among the members of the Academy.

And then things started to change, not suddenly but gradually. In the eyes of the academy, smaller and smaller independent films – like Barry Jenkins Moonlight—Began to outdo more expensive, more splashing and large studio films. After the 2015 So White Oscars campaign, the composition of the academy has also changed. And most of the best film winners in the past five years –Parasite (which also took the prize for the best international film), Nomadland, Coda, And All everywhere at the same time– emerged of unexpected origin other than a large American studio. Even the winner of the best film of last year, Oppenheimer, probably landed where he did because his director, Christopher Nolan, unhappy with the terms that his usual studio, Warner Bros., had offered for his previous film PrincipleCleverly kept the low production costs (less than $ 100 million, not much for an image of this scale) and negotiated a relatively luxurious window with theatrical liberation with the studio which finally published the film, Universal. In other words, he again thought of as an independent filmmaker, which you have to do these days to exercise a kind of artistic authority as a filmmaker.

Find out more: The nominees for the favorite Oscars of our film criticism in 2025

This last race for Oscars in general, and Baker’s film in particular, are only strengthening this trend. We cannot even call it with precision the rise in the independent film, because this trend has been boiling for years now, first, as we were at the heart of the pandemic, then when we understood how to get out. At this point, it would be an anomaly for any film funded and published by one of the Big Five Studios – Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros., Walt Disney Studios or Sony – to win an Oscar.

How did we get here? It is not even necessary to ask this question: greed. We all know that Hollywood’s first objective has always been to make money. Despite this, the studios loved to finance the great films “rewards” because these images would have reflected their own moral values, as well as their dedication to crafts and tradition. The prices were considered to be part of the gain for the wonderful artistic achievements that these studios produced or really thought that they produced.

But now that major studios are generally so obsessed with profits – either Pvod benefits or a hybrid model that can only include a superficial theatrical output – independent films, or films made by mini -major, like A24, are presented to most of what we consider films “worthy of” worthy of the Oscar “. Gratitude that his little film has managed to accumulate against films costing several million dollars, he was not wrong. Wicked to win the best film. Wicked was of course the biggest and more splashing at the box office. But by just making the film he wanted to make – on a small budget, which is his usual way of working – Baker inadvertently supplied something that seemed fresh and attractive: a fractured -fairyte -Sweet romantic comedy about a terribly sympathetic young woman by Brighton Beach, trying to find the happiness of the same means, as a way too long.

You can love both Wicked And Anora. But one of these films represents a formula that does not work as well as before. And if the chiefs of these relatively new studio-star hybrids are more interested in earning money than winning prices, which seems to be the case, they certainly get their wish. If did To worry about the Oscar victories, the smaller and independent filmmakers would be their main competition. Brady Corbet The brutalist won awards for the best original partition and the best cinematography, and his star, Adrien Brody, won the prize for best actor. Corbet made the film, widely shot in Hungary, for only $ 10 million, a small amount for an ambitious epic. A similar ingenuity seems to have been the key for most of the winners and pretenders of the Oscars of this year: Jesse Eisenberg made his modest drama but affecting A real pain (for which Kieran Culkin won the price for the best supporter of support) The old -fashioned, cheaply, cheap manner; He was picked up by spotlights after his first in Sundance. And the filmmaker Latton Gints Zilbalodis made his magnificent animated environmental parable To flow– The first independent animated feature to be won in the Oscar animation category – using open -source software. You cannot get more non-pixar than that.

It may be true that some of these films have given us a better theater outside of cinema than in it. The daring but controversial musical by Jacques Audiard Emilia Pérez, Released by Netflix, saw his chances of Oscar falling after being revealed that one of her stars, Karla Sofía Gascón, had a story of making racist remarks on social networks. (Despite this, her Costar Zoe Saldaña won the best support actress.) And the filmmaker’s filmmaker from Coralie Fargeat, Coralie Fargeat, The substance won a single price, for the best makeup and hairstyle. But that gave us one of the best pre-match races in recent prices history: although Demi Moore has not won the prize for the best actress for which she was nominated, the serious heat of the speeches she delivered as she accepted the prices did Win, at the Golden Globes and Sag, made her the kind of competitor you wanted to root.

Find out more: Demi Moore and the defective notion of a “serious” game

This is the kind of good will that major studios cannot buy – and don’t care anyway. And maybe it’s just the development we need, to save the idea of ​​films as we have always known. Accepting his speech for the best director, Baker noted that all the cinemas, in particular those who are independent, are in difficulty. “If we do not invert this trend, we lose a vital part of our culture,” he continued. “This is my battle cry. The filmmakers continue to make films for the big screen. I know I will do it.

Baker Anora Victory is much softer when you consider that it is a guy who has made a wonderful functionality, 2015 Tangerine, on an iPhone. It is the march and the word of the incarnation of possibility. Meanwhile, it is the streaming conglomerates that erudite the legacy of Hollywood, while younger and more ingenious filmmakers work to keep it alive, sometimes at their expense. Perhaps, more and more, the Oscars provide at least one roadmap to viewers / consumers who to want Show films – who want to see them big, as far as possible, even if in many regions of the country, they may need to drive 100 miles (or more) to do it. Even then, when watching a film on the big screen is simply not possible, it may still mean something to hear and read a film – having a feeling of anticipation – before you have the chance to watch it at home.