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“Anora” Wins Best Picture

The 97th Academy Awards aired on March 2. Despite controversies in the lead up to the Oscars (The Brutalist AI drama, & Emilia Perez star Karla Sofia Gascon’s old resurfaced tweets), the telecast was relatively smooth sailing.

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo kicked off the night with a Wizard of Oz medley. The camera opened to Grande wearing a ruby colored dress with matching slippers (alluding to the original) as she sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Erivo then sang a song from “The Wiz”.

After the Academy decided to cut Best Original Song nominees performances from the telecast they replaced it with tribute type performances. However, the length and amount of performances eventually felt out of hand. If viewers desired such great amounts of musical performances, the Grammys was the awards show to watch, not the Oscars.

This leads us to the issue of timing, something that seems to happen during every single Oscars telecast, but felt more pronounced this year. Acceptance speeches for the technical categories – Best Sound, Best Hair & Makeup, etc. – were cut unreasonably short. The winners of these “smaller” awards were seen being cut off by the music, and some individuals didn’t even get to speak, especially if there were multiple collaborators. While these acceptance speeches did not feature the names of big stars, each winner still deserved a moment to commemorate the large achievement that is winning an Oscar.

The acceptances given larger amounts of speaking time brought many unneeded speeches with others providing some uplifting anecdotes.

When “El Mal” featured Emilia Perez won Best Original Song, one of the writers, Camille Audiard, started singing the song lyrics into the mic. From an audience perspective, it seemed Audicard was attempting to influence a sing along which failed. Instead, this action resulted in awkward silence.

Meanwhile, Adrian Brody provided the longest speech of the night and officially in Oscars history. In fact, when the music was played ushering him off the stage he quite literally told them off and continued with his speech. Despite the length of his acceptance he did not say anything revolutionary; however, there were some touching moments on his evolution as a person and actor.

On a different note, Best Director winner Sean Baker took the given opportunity to speak on the importance of supporting local movie theaters. He provided great passion with much emphasis on the power and importance of supporting independent art. This was only one of the four times Baker was on stage for his work in Anora during the ceremony. In fact, Baker made Academy Awards history as the first person to win four Oscars (director, original screenplay, editing, and best picture) for the same film. Walt Disney also won four awards in one Oscars Ceremony, but that was for different films.

The most powerful and politically motivated speech of the night came from Best Documentary “No Other Land.” Directors Palestinian Basel Adra and Israliean Yuval Abraham pleaded for the end of the Palestine-Israel military and ethnic conflict. They also called out the current state of the U.S. foreign policy.

Overall, the 2025 Oscars was nowhere near as exciting or eventful as many in the past. However, the ceremony was a great night for the cast and crew Anora which commemorated the Academy’s appreciation for independent cinema.