 "Why Anora’s Oscar win is being hailed in Russia")
Sean Baker’s independent movie Anora has won worldwide accolades. The film broke all records with the most Academy Award wins by a single person in one night on Sunday (March 2).
Anora bagged five awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, and Best Editing at the 2025 Oscars. The film’s success is being celebrated in the West as well as Russia.
Let’s take a closer look.
What’s Anora about?
Anora, a 2 hours and 19 minutes film, follows its eponymous lead – a New York sex worker who marries a Russian oligarch’s son.
Anora or Ani is played by 25-year-old Mikey Madison, who won the Best Actress award for her role at the Oscars. Ivan, the reckless son of a Russian oligarch, is played by Russian actor Mark Eydelshteyn.
Russian actor Yura Borisov portrays Igor, the Russian bodyguard who is supposed to help moderate a sticky situation after Ivan marries the New York stripper Anora.
It is Igor, a brutal but surprisingly sensitive Russian henchman, who starts seeing the tenderness inside Anora hidden behind her tough exterior.
Made on a small budget of $6 million, Sean Baker’s contemporary Cinderella-like fairytale has been well-received in the West and Russia.
Why Anora is being hailed in Russia
Anora’s success is being hailed in Russia, particularly due to Yura Borisov’s nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
While he lost the award to Kieran Culkin who played Benji Kaplan in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, Borisov has emerged as a star back home.
The 32-year-old actor was not a well-known face in Russia. However, he became popular after bagging the first Oscar nomination for a Russian actor since 1978.
“I can’t remember such an orgy of admiration, such an avalanche of universal interest,” film critic Larisa Malyukova wrote on Telegram.
According to Malyukova, people in Russia were elated at Borisov’s nomination, which lifted the country’s cultural isolation since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022. After the Russian invasion in 2022, most major Hollywood film companies stopped releasing new films in Russia. However, pirated versions of the big Hollywood movies are still available.
“People don’t want us to be completely cut off. They want the impossible, for a Russian name to be announced on the Dolby sound system in cinemas, to the whole world,” she wrote, as per AFP.
“Yura Borisov did not win the Oscar but he won the main award – the hearts of millions of viewers,” Russian film distributor Central Partnership wrote on Telegram.
After being banned from participating in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris due to the Ukraine war, Russia’s mere presence at the Oscars was portrayed as a “national victory” for Russian culture.
“Russian culture can’t be cancelled. Russia itself can’t be cancelled,” Sergei Markov, a prominent pro-Kremlin commentator, reportedly wrote in a post on Telegram. “Sooner or later, the West will have to come to terms with Russia.”
Why Anora’s win has garnered mixed reactions
Anora’s victory at the Oscars has left many uncomfortable in the West. The movie is neither pro-Russian or anti-Russian. It is set before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and hence the Russian oligarch can jet in and out of the US without the obstruction of sanctions.
However, the celebration of Anora in Russia as a “national victory” has left many in a quandary.
Russian actors Yura Borisov and Mark Eydelshteyn have neither publicly condemned Russia’s war with Ukraine nor supported it. As per The Guardian, this “ambiguity” has allowed the actors to move freely between Russia and the West.
Their silence comes even as many Russian artists and creatives had to flee the country after criticising the Ukraine war due to fears of persecution.
With the US President Donald Trump likely to reach a peace deal in Russia, it could end the sanctions, marking the return of Hollywood flicks to Russian theatres.
With inputs from agencies
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