Sean Baker's Oscar Wins: The Case For Independent Cinema
The Dolby Theater erupted in cheers and applause as Meg Ryan read “Anora” from the Best Picture envelope at the 97th Academy Awards.
The last award of the night was the 5th for Anora and 4th for Sean Baker, who broke the record for most personal wins in a single night for a single film.
Anora’s Best Picture win is nothing short of unexpected and monumental. The 97th Academy Awards seem to bathe in the greatness of independent cinema with Flow winning Best Animated Feature over big studio productions like The Wild Robot and Inside Out 2.
The Case For Independent Cinema:
Independent cinema goes beyond the size of the budget. Anora cost around $6 million to make, and Flow cost around $4 million. This isn’t a lot of money to produce Oscar-winning films. In fact, last year’s Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer, cost almost 17 Anoras to produce, and that was still considered a relatively “small” budget movie given the cast, and scale of it.
While money is a big boiling point for independent cinema, the identity lies in the people behind the films, not the profit margins. Sean Baker has been advocating indies his entire career, with all of his own productions being 100% independent. Most, if not all to some degree, of Sean’s films deal with the kind of subject matter that doesn’t get a lot of butts in the theater. Especially with the advent of streaming, some independent films fall victim to the “I’ll wait for it to come out on streaming” black hole.
So when Sean Baker was able to sneak in “long live independent film” as the last line of the Best Picture acceptance speech, it rang like a battle cry.
It is increasingly hard to find an indie movie playing in a theater, unless you live in a city that has a repertoire of independently-owned movie theaters, sadly another dying branch of the industry.
What the big studios need to realize is that you can’t BUY independent filmmaking. You can fund it, you can support it, but you can’t try to control it. Studio interference is the poison of art. Orson Welles knew it. David Lynch knew it. Independent filmmakers want and need support. They don’t need big stars, they don’t need extravagant CGI budgets, or world-renowned crew, they just need space and time and comfort to bring their art to life.
Independent cinema is dying, and in that suffering beautiful movies are being born. Movies we will probably never hear about unless they get proper distribution, or win an Oscar.
So support your filmmaking friends however you can, patronize your local independent theater, and do away with waiting for a movie to come out on streaming to watch it.
Long live independent film.
Check out the full list of Oscar winners here.
