Anora’s Five-Oscar Triumph: A Masterpiece Or A Dangerous Glamorization Of Sex Work?

The film’s writer and director, Sean Baker, set an Oscars record by winning four awards for the same film. His decision to edit the film himself, and its success in all major filmmaking categories, solidified this milestone. While Hollywood celebrated Anora’s historic win, film buffs were disappointed by the Best Actress and Best Picture upsets.

During the Oscars, film buffs pointed to Mikey Madison’s win as a vindication of The Substance’s message: that Hollywood uses women for their youth and beauty, sucks everything out of them, and subsequently discards them once they’ve “aged out.” Some even accused Mikey Madison of robbing Demi Moore’s thunder as a result of being a young, sexualized actress performing Hollywood’s obligatory humiliation ritual (degrading oversexualization in order to be successful in the industry.) 

Film Twitter was ablaze with outrage, debating the film’s artistic merit. The film faced criticism from all angles—from the sex worker community for perpetuating regressive stereotypes and from conservatives who saw it as glamorizing sex work. How could such polar opposite interpretations exist?

It has something to do with what Namwali Serpell of The New Yorker has termed the New Literalism—something Serpell argues is ruining modern films because audiences demand heavy-handed messaging to ensure the political and social messaging is spoon-fed to us, leaving no room for ambiguity or “incorrect” interpretations. Lynchian up-to-interpretation-vaguery is out of fashion. We want to be spoon-fed our worldview explicitly, and without effort; certainly without any stonewalling of the arguments it sets out to dispel.

Is Anora an Endorsement or Condemnation of Sex Work?

Watching the Oscar race and the absurd discourse over Anora play out before seeing the film, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had no familiarity with Baker’s previous work and had seen equal condemnation from both ends of the political spectrum. Both sides insisted their interpretation was correct: either the film fetishized and minimized sex workers or it glamorized prostitution. On a rainy Saturday, as a cyclone barreled toward Brisbane, I finally turned it on. My expectations weren’t well defined but they were certainly low. What I wasn’t expecting was that the film’s messaging had little to do with sex work at all. Instead, Anora is a film about power and class more than sexuality.

The film is structured in two halves: the rom-com fantasy and the brutal class reality. Ani, who goes by Anora outside of sex work, meets Vanya, the wealthy nepo baby of a Russian oligarch, at the strip club where she works. He takes a liking to her because she speaks Russian, though she prefers not to. When he asks if she works outside the club, she gives him her number.

What I wasn’t expecting was that the film’s messaging had little to do with sex work at all.

At his mansion, we learn she is a full-service sex worker. After the deed is done, Vanya offers her $15,000 to be his "horny American girlfriend" for the week. She notifies the strip club she’ll be taking a week off, something they have little say in as long as they refuse to provide her with benefits. We’re starting to get a glimpse of the commodification of women’s bodies, and the sex workers aren’t shy about expressing their disgust for their customers over a work break cigarette. One sex worker shares with Anora that a man she was entertaining said she looked like his 18-year old daughter and then bought five dances from her. Anora replies, "That's fucking disgusting."

From here, the film takes on a Pretty Woman meets Cinderella story, where Anora goes from rags to riches thanks to a wealthy man who takes an interest in her, and changes her life overnight. The film is stylistically shot like a fever dream. The film’s grit and naturalistic dialogue imparts an Uncut Gems-esque style on an otherwise familiar tale. While in Vegas, Vanya proposes to Anora on an impulsive whim, and for transparently transactional purposes: he needs a Green Card to become an American so he won’t have to work for his father’s company in Russia.

At first, Anora is annoyed that he would tease her with such a prospect, to dangle the enticement of a better life in front of her face (she lives in a poor area of Brooklyn, by the train station and works graveyard shifts pleasing sleazy men for money), but he’s serious. They get married in a Vegas chapel, but this is where the fairytale ends, and a very different film begins—one more in line with class conscious social critiques like Parasite or The White Lotus, where the wealthy treat the lower class as something that is disposable or less than. They aren't seen, heard, or treated with respect. They're a means to an end and that end is usually the wealthy's own amusement. 

Once Vanya’s parents learn of this unseemly marriage to a lowly sex worker, something that’s repeatedly remarked as something that brings dishonor upon their family, they’re intent on ensuring it is annulled. Vanya’s parents task three henchmen of varying places in the hierarchy with getting the deed done. After entering the house and informing Vanya his parents are on their way to America from Russia, he makes a run for it, leaving Anora behind. We as the audience are apprehensive about the power dynamics between the henchmen and Anora, given their size and strength and her vulnerable position as a woman left with three men intent on holding her against her will while she has no pants on. 

However, the film subverts expectations. It becomes clear rather early on that these men have no intention of bringing physical harm to Anora, and are also at the mercy of this powerful family. Anora is given a lot of agency in this scene. It’s she who harms them—throwing things, biting, even breaking one of their noses. It’s an extremely funny, chaotic scene that is incredibly unexpected. When one of the men, Igor, suggests tying her hands and legs to restrain her, however, she lets out a guttural scream that reminds us of the inherent danger of her profession. They may appear threatening, but they’re ultimately powerless employees carrying out orders.

The four of them spend the rest of the night searching for Vanya through Brooklyn. They search various clubs, run along the boardwalk in the freezing cold, and nearly get their car towed as they spend their evening chasing after a privileged rich kid who refuses to grow up. It’s here that the true heart of the film shines: in class solidarity. All of these people are either working class or at the very least considerably lower on the hierarchy of money and power than Vanya’s family. We constantly see shots of the working class cleaning up after Vanya’s mess or being treated as things to bribe, push around, or play with. After a long night of running around searching for Vanya, the four of them share a meal together at a diner. This is one of the most obvious scenes to signify shared class struggle in an incredibly ironic way.

Anora views these henchmen who are bullying her into getting her marriage to Vanya annulled with disdain. She fights to stay married to Vanya, but he’s out on a bender around the city, getting wasted, and won’t answer her calls. Eventually finding him getting a lap dance from her work rival Diamond, he’s too drunk to reason with, and he hardly exchanges more than a few words with her for the rest of the film. He remains controlled by his parents. Anora continues to delude herself into believing that things can still work out, that his parents will understand because they want him to be happy, but it becomes clear this marriage can’t be saved. 

His parents don’t just disapprove or look down on Anora, which they do, but they remind her just how little power she has. In attempting to assert her power in the situation, she threatens to get a lawyer and sue him for half of what he’s worth because she didn’t sign a prenup. Vanya’s mother quickly dispels her delusions of savviness, reminding her that they can ruin her life and ensure that she loses everything. Anora becomes disillusioned, as she recognizes she wasn’t anything more than a play-thing for Vanya to discard and her hopes of class ascension were nothing but a fantastical pipe dream. 

One of the henchmen, Igor, faces relentless attacks from Anora. She views him with disdain for a few reasons. She’s skeptical of his intentions as a man, as she’s accustomed to men using her for sex, not for pure intentions. When Igor shows genuine care and concern for her, when he sees her as a person—as Anora, not Ani—she doesn’t know how to react, so she suspects him of being nefarious. She accuses him of being a “faggot ass bitch” for not wanting to rape her and resists his acts of kindness. When he offers her his scarf because he notices she’s cold (the same scarf they used to gag her earlier because she wouldn’t stop shouting “rape” so the men would let her go), she assumes that he brought it to tie her up and gag her again. Igor remains undeterred by Anora’s steely exterior, which he seems to know is a front—some kind of coping mechanism or means of survival. 

However, once Anora becomes conscious of her hopes for class ascension slipping away from her, realizing that this family left her worse off than she started, she starts to succumb to Igor’s kindness; what can most aptly be described as solidarity. She has a freak out on the plane on the way to Nevada to get the marriage annulled, shouting at Vanya that he’s “fucking pathetic.” It’s notable that during this sequence, various henchmen try at inappropriate times to earn the approval of the wealthy family they work for, but all are put back in their place. Igor hands Anora a glass of water, noticing how upset she is, and as a way to help her stuff down her emotions. It’s a symbolic “don’t let them get you down” moment. 

Anora signs the annulment papers and Igor asks the family to apologize to her. The way Anora is teased with a whirlwind romance and marriage based on such a transparently transactional relationship may seem too naive for her to believe as a self aware sex worker, but it’s akin to the way Belinda is teased by Tanya in season one of The White Lotus, with a suggested investment from a wealthy woman into her business. The suggestion is made flippantly by Tanya, who says it as an afterthought and then becomes disinterested as she becomes distracted. For Belinda, however, it’s something that would be transformative for her circumstances. We intuit just how cruel it is for Belinda to get her hopes up when she had no intention of making good on her promise. It’s the difference between entirely different lives. 

Anora holds disdain for Igor’s acceptance of his lot in life (he seems content with his lower status), but she’s also afraid of being seen. But Igor does see her—he sees Anora instead of Ani. Ani is nothing more than a persona and despite the fact Anora has become convinced that her persona is who she is, it’s still just performance. Anora is performing as Ani throughout the entire runtime of this film. She performs as a sex worker, as a hardened street-smart girl who can hold her own against the wealthy, as a wifey to Vanya who can be part of the upper class. It’s only in the final scene—a tender moment shared between Igor and Anora when he goes to drop her off at her apartment and offers her wedding ring to her, something he took because he thinks it should belong to her (yet another gesture of class solidarity) that we finally see her walls break down. Her first instinct is tragic: it’s to turn on Ani. 

So accustomed to transactional “love,” Igor takes her bags to the door, but Ani stays in the car. He returns and Ani enters seduction mode, climbs on top of him, and begins to initiate sex with Igor. Their relationship up to this point has been strictly platonic, but it’s like Anora only knows how to express and receive love one way: with sex. Consequently, she’s afraid of true vulnerability. When Igor pulls her face in to kiss her, she resists, then she fights, hitting him and pulling away until she finally collapses onto his chest and breaks down crying. The facade is over. The film cuts to black. What the hell did we just watch? 

The sex work narrative is nothing more than a narrative device for a story that is wholly about class, performance, and power dynamics. It's about the futility of ascending up the hierarchy of power and class, because the system will just drag you back down. Often, it's even the working class who do the wealthy's bidding for them (the henchmen), effectively upholding the system that holds people like Anora down. I thought the film was beautifully tragic, even if its messaging was much more economically cynical than my personal politics. 

Do the Criticisms of Anora Hold Merit?

Speculation over the director’s personal politics seemed to cloud audience perceptions of the film. Bad press and optics started to sour its target audience, who became preoccupied with the presumed political opinions of its director. Taking notice of Baker’s “questionable” following list, which included right wing accounts like LibsofTikTok and IDF Babes, people used it as evidence of a reactionary agenda. This fed into a discourse about whether Anora was an exploitation of sex work or a legitimate portrayal of its stigma. These criticisms reached an inflection point when Mikey Madison revealed in a Variety interview that she declined to use an intimacy coordinator. Many viewed this as harmful to actresses who might feel pressured to follow suit.

The outrage was pretty ironic. The pro-sex work left worried about an actress’s agency in declining an intimacy coordinator while ignoring the reality that actual sex workers don’t have that luxury. Prostitutes, strippers, and escorts navigate far more dangerous situations without any industry protections. The pro sex work left came in direct conflict with choice feminists who defended Madison’s decision as personal. 

They argued that she should think about the ramifications this could have on other young actresses who may feel pressured not to advocate for themselves due to the power imbalance between the filmmaker and a new actress, all the while treating sex work like a job as ordinary as any other. It was frustrating to see so many uncharitable opinions of this film for such superficial reasons, all while treating sex work as some kind of philanthropic endeavor unfairly slated by evil people for no reason at all. 

The leftist critiques of Anora’s failure to lean into didactic storytelling began to border on absurd. Thinkpieces were penned rambling about the various ways Anora fell short as a Pro Sex Work Manifesto—something Baker never set out to do, despite his intention to shine a light on the stigma that sex workers face. A lot of the tweets and articles I read were taking issue with the fact that Anora depicted rather than advocated, but while film is a fictional story that “holds space” for certain sociopolitical ideas, it doesn’t need to be an end in itself. 

Lefty film Twitter started to become self aware of the absurdity and began penning tongue-in-cheek parodies of these criticisms: “Anora would’ve been better if she educated men on communist theory while working at her local unhoused shelter, the movie culminating in a musical number from a diverse group of women that promotes friendship, community, phDs and sex workers.” The left rejects clichéd "hookers with hearts of gold" a la Pretty Woman but bristles when a sex worker character is layered and imperfect.

On the other hand, conservatives interpreted the mere inclusion of a sex worker character as evidence of a pro sex work agenda. While it’s true both Sean Baker and lead actress Mikey Madison have continually paid homage or considered themselves “allies” of the sex worker community, it doesn’t suggest the film’s objective was to paint sex work in a purely positive light. It’s also not unreasonable that a filmmaker would have compassion for the subject they seek to portray, even if that subject operates within a moral gray area. The film continually shows the harms that sex work can entail: emotional detachment, fractured identity, the degradation by those around you, physical vulnerability and the threat of violence.

Asking whether Anora is pro or anti sex work is missing the point. The film isn't a moralistic tale about the sex work industry. It reveals the dehumanizing effects of sex work by framing it within the broader exploitation of the working class. The swift end of the fairytale shows how Anora, like the henchmen, is nothing more than an expendable pawn in a system that ensures people like her never truly escape their circumstances. People’s frustrations stem from Anora's unwillingness to take a side in the culture war, but its refusal to do so is what makes it so compelling.