The Oscars continue to reward women—especially Black women—who package their pain into performances of vulnerability, while those who refuse to soften their rage remain overlooked.
One of my favorite performances from 2024 was not even nominated for the Academy Awards. Marianne Jean-Baptiste—partnering again with Mike Leigh, whose previous film Secrets & Lies (1996) led to her Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress—is a tour de force of rage and crippling depression in Hard Truths. At times, her blistering remarks and caustic encounters with both family members and strangers contribute to the film’s comedic moments. But there is no denying the real pain (both physical and emotional) that she suffers throughout the narrative, and which no one in her circle of relatives seem able to alleviate.
The ending—which depicts her “I’m so, so tired” exhaustion—renders her emotionless and quite literally unable to provide care for either her adult son or her husband, the latter whom she can no longer tolerate and who desperately seeks her affection and nurturing after a work injury, only to be left hanging in limbo.
Perhaps this ambiguous ending, with no moral resolution to her character Pansy’s distress (which literally relegates her to “Angry Black Woman” trope), was too unsatisfying and discomforting to be recognized by the Academy Awards. Often times, audiences (and Academy voters) prefer Black women’s anger expressed through sass and moral clarity, and we have seen these roles honored with Oscars, mostly in supporting actor roles: from last year’s winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers, to Viola Davis’ beleaguered wife in Fences, to Whoopi Goldberg’s sassy psychic in Ghost, even to the first Black Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel, playing the role of Mammy in Gone With the Wind.
And if she is not reliably sassy, she’s the film’s moral compass (think Regina King’s award-winning role in If Beale Street Could Talk) or abject victim (think Lupita Nyong’o’s debut winning role in 12 Years a Slave as the brutally beat-down and enslaved Patsey).
But mostly, her rage must be entertaining and over-the-top—belted out even—in a powerful display of musical vocals: from Jennifer Hudson’s debut winning role as the betrayed Effie Johnson in Dreamgirls, to this year’s Cynthia Erivo, nominated for but losing Best Actress in her villain turn as the wronged and misunderstood Elphaba in Wicked.
Erivo’s emotionally absorbing musicality made such an impression that it was unsurprising she and her co-star Ariana Grande were invited to open the Oscars telecast, and rightly so. They marveled in a tribute both to the Hollywood “home” of Los Angeles, still recovering from January’s wildfires, and the Hollywood “dreams” provided through movies like The Wizard of Oz, the origin story for both Wicked and another spinoff, the Black urban musical The Wiz, which provided the anthem “Home” that Erivo sang effortlessly, coupled with Grande’s smooth rendition of “Over the Rainbow.”
This movie musical tribute made for a sublime buildup to their duet “Defying Gravity.” This opening performance also demonstrated a beautiful sisterhood, as Grande supported then graciously stepped back to allow for Erivo’s climactic blowout on the song’s finale. While Wicked, which received 10 Oscar nominations, only won two for Best Production Design and Best Costume Design (the winner, Paul Tazewell, making history as the first Black male winner in this category), its box-office popularity could not be ignored, which subsequently anchored the telecast in this celebration of movies.
This popularity relied on its adaptation of the equally popular Broadway musical, which debuted in 2003, and overshadowed another movie musical: Netflix’s divisive Emilia Perez, which garnered a Best Supporting Actress win for Zoe Saldana and may have even been a frontrunner for Best Picture and Best Actress for its groundbreaking trans woman star Karla Sofia Gascon, were it not for Gascon’s controversial racist and Islamophobic tweets that derailed the film’s chances for Oscars dominance.
Saldana—whose reliably long box-office movie career pivoted towards this gutsy, searing role as Rita Mora Castro, the defense lawyer for a Mexican drug cartel boss—became the 11th Black woman to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar (and the “first of Dominican descent,” for which she tearfully accepted as a “proud daughter of immigrants” in a role that required her to speak Spanish). Saldana’s dedication of her award to both her mother and grandmother really hit home the importance of representation and diversity, even within the Black Diaspora.
The appearances of Saldana, Erivo and even Gascon as Oscar nominees kept the #OscarsSoWhite and other criticisms of inclusivity at bay this year. But some have accused the Academy of ageism, after 62-year-old frontrunner Demi Moore, in her career-turning role as an aging star desperately doing everything to return to her lost youth in Coralie Fargeat’s body horror film The Substance, eventually lost to 25-year-old Mikey Madison for Anora, Sean Baker’s indie film that also won Best Picture, Editing and Original Screenplay awards.
My own feelings are mixed on this. On the one hand, I found The Substance’s grotesque excesses (which earned the film its only Oscar win for Best Makeup and Hair Styling) to be over-the-top and unnecessarily gross in its cinematic argument for the ways that women self-annihilate as they literally and figuratively twist themselves into unrecognizable monstrosities in the pursuit of youth and beauty.
On the other hand, I viewed Moore to be achingly convincing in a role that launched her career comeback, and many (myself included) eagerly anticipated her crowning achievement with an Oscar win after already bagging Golden Globes, Critics Choice and SAG awards in the precursors leading up to the Academy Awards.
Of course … in the trajectory of awards seasons, the eventual winning choice played out like the plot of The Substance. However, can we really say ageism is truly at play when Michelle Yeoh two years earlier became the first Asian to win Best Actress at the same age Moore is now?
These awards competitions and shows construct a narrative that is more than just merit and talent … and the optics look very much like an aging star, who bared all for the camera … losing out to the more agile and sexualized young star.
All things being equal, Mikey Madison delivered a more emotionally gut-punch performance in Anora, as did Fernanda Torres in I’m Still Here. But these awards competitions and shows construct a narrative that is more than just merit and talent. The politics of voting in these categories create optics, and the optics look very much like an aging star, who bared all for the camera (and looked fabulous while doing so, even if her nudity evokes memories of her nude scenes during her sexy movies era), losing out to the more agile and sexualized young star in the grittier indie film with a realism stretched towards dark comedy.
Films like these, including their young stars, rarely win Academy Awards. However, Anora already made an impression at the Cannes Film Festival when it won the Palme D’Or and, as The Hollywood Reporter noted, once Neon distributed the film, it followed in the footsteps of the Korean film Parasite, which also won the 2019 Palme D’Or and Best Picture Oscar.
Mikey Madison plays the titular Anora (who prefers to be called Ani), a sex worker from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, who commutes to work in one of Manhattan’s strip clubs called The Headquarters. She is feisty, charming and as adept as she is in working the room, also naïve (as one would expect of a 20-something exotic dancer). It’s interesting to see how someone who constantly negotiates her price and time with customers would somehow become seduced by the lavish lifestyle provided by Vanya (played by Mark Edelshtein), the wealthy son of a Russian oligarch.
On a whim, they marry at a wedding chapel while vacationing for a week in Las Vegas. But much of the drama takes place after the marriage, when Vanya’s parents learn of the quickie marriage and send their goons to force an annulment—including one “muscle” man, Igor, played by Yura Borisov, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role, who starts falling for Ani.
As the feminist philosopher Susan Bordo notes, this film is very much the antithesis of the literal Disneyfication of Pretty Woman, in which there is no rom-com fairytale ending for the sex worker seeking class ascendancy with the “right client.” However, writer and sex worker Marla Cruz is more critical of its depiction of sex work, arguing, “Anora embodies the dehumanizing consumer fantasy of a devoted worker who loves the consumer so much she does not conceive of her servitude as labor.”
I tend toward Anora being critical of both the consumer fantasy and the labor fantasy needed to uphold it.
One scene depicts Ani holding onto Vanya, who is busy playing a video game, as she is curled up on the sofa of his lavish home. A house cleaner vacuums around them. The shot capturing this moment drove home both women’s labor—the cleaner’s domestic duties, Ani’s performance of loving girlfriend (and soon to be wife, before the forced annulment)—set against the complete time-wasting leisure of Vanya’s childish whims supported by indulgent wealthy parents. Madison’s performance is subtle here: We see her taking comfort in her emotional labor with just a jolt of reality to what her role is when juxtaposed against the domestic worker.
When Black women extras shape the background action … they reiterate a recognizable trope in Western stories and art. Black women serve as the hypersexual subtext for the main text of white women’s transgressions.
The film Anora is notable for including actual sex workers who performed supporting roles, like Diamond (Lindsey Normington) and Lulu (Luna Sophia Miranda), but it is not above fetishizing their bodies, as the opening scene depicts a series of T&A spectacles that establish its location in the seedy and shadowy world of sex work (with colorful lights distorting the views). In this opening shot, my own Black feminist gaze picked out the lone Black stripper, whose face is barely visible but her breasts were on display (a departure from the typical fetishization of Black booty).
The Black sex worker comes into focus again towards the film’s climax when Ani and henchmen in toe enter The Headquarters to search frantically for the immature Vanya who had disappeared and left Ani to fend for herself. Behind the closed doors (flung dramatically open in the search for Vanya) were a number of Black strippers providing their private lap dances for mostly white clientele; their nude bodies again framed this world through the lens of racial and sexual excess and taboo, not unlike the ways fetishized Black bodies framed the action in Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003), starring Meg Ryan.
When Black women extras shape the background action (with their twerk dance appropriated and incorporated into Madison’s stripper performance), they reiterate a recognizable trope in Western stories and art. Black women serve as the hypersexual subtext for the main text of white women’s transgressions.
In movie roles, we want women—even when they are tough or funny or sassy—to always be vulnerable, to open themselves up to our judgment and our sympathy.
When women of color sex workers are the main text—think Janicza Bravo’s Zola (2020), starring Taylour Paige and based on the viral Twitter story told (and written) by A’Ziah (Zola) King, and Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers (2019), which critics teased would lead to an Oscar nomination for Jennifer Lopez’s strong turn as star pole dancer Ramona (it didn’t)—they rarely receive awards for it. Hollywood may love its sex workers, from Pretty Woman to Leaving Las Vegas and, now, Anora, but it likes a certain kind of sex worker: not just white, but vulnerable.
Despite her tough talk, give-as-good-as-she-gets feisty defenses, Madison’s Anora is quite vulnerable, which makes her redeemable—a stark contrast to Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Tralala in Exit to Brooklyn (1989), for example, whose gang-bang turned gang rape literally ruined her chances at redemption. We especially see Ani’s vulnerability towards the end when she, in an attempt to take back her power from Igor, whose sensitivity and affection after rough-handling her as a paid goon discombobulates her, collapses on his lap—thus ruining whatever “lap dance” power she may have sought. This emotional ending perhaps sealed the deal for Madison’s Oscar win.
Comparing this emotional release to the lack of release that ends Hard Truths, it hit me. In movie roles, we want women—even when they are tough or funny or sassy—to always be vulnerable, to open themselves up to our judgment and our sympathy.
If only Marianne Jean-Baptiste had shown some vulnerability and collapsed in tears to close the film. She did have such a collapse earlier (inappropriate laughter melting into uncontrollable sobs) but it occurred at a family gathering and was more jarring than sympathetic. A well-placed cry at film’s end may not have dethroned Madison’s win, but she at least would have been nominated for an Oscar.
