The Oscars are more often noteworthy for their snubs than for the wins –the 97th Academy Awards are no exception. Yes, Anora swept five categories and that’s no small achievement for a 6-million-dollar independent movie: best picture, best original screenplay, best editing, best director (Sean Baker), best actress (Mikey Madison). Yes, Baker thanked the “sex worker community” in his acceptance speech and so did Madison, pledging her support. But Madison’s Anora didn’t break new ground: it is only the last in a long series of sex worker characters –drawn from a male perspective– that earned either an Academy Award or a nomination. “Sex, in Anora (…) is ultimately a device that allows the real story to begin,” writes Variety. “Whereas in Queer, in Babygirl and especially in Challengers, sex is the story –to a degree that one must sit with, perhaps uncomfortably. It’s Craig’s desire for Drew Starkey, Kidman’s desire for Harris Dickinson and Zendaya’s desire…”
Kidman won the Volpi cup for best actress in Venice and was named one of the ‘women of the year’ by TIME magazine, but her Romy Mathis character in Babygirl, the female gaze at the male body and the sadomasochistic affair with Dickinson were too risqué, too “uncomfortable” for the Academy. Imagine Daniel Craig’s love/lust for a younger man in Queer! “The sexual representation of the male body,” observes Peter Lehman in Running Scared, “remains a strong cultural taboo, especially in any context involving homosexuality [Queer, in this instance] or women looking, objectifying, assessing, talking or desiring” [Babygirl and Challengers. Neither got nominated]. Could Anora score five wins, we wonder, if the roles were reversed, with the boy as the hustler and the girl as the client?
Half of the ten movies nominated for best picture were R-rated –Anora for “strong sexual content throughout, graphic nudity, pervasive language and drug use.” The other half were PG or PG-13-rated (including Wicked and Conclave). While we celebrate the five that do feature “some adult material” –and Anora in particular– we can’t help but remark that Midnight Cowboy (1969) is, to date, the only X-rated movie to win.
Isn’t it time for the Motion Picture Association to revisit its rating system and for the Academy to soften the stigma of the NC-17 rating, abandon the prejudice against sex and welcome more “patently adult” stories? Told by a woman, for a change, and through a woman’s gaze?
