This is very subjective and you should not take this seriously.

Just looking at recent best movie winners at Oscars, I can easily put them into three categories:

1) these are the movies that are the core of Oscars, so who really cares (Oppenheimer, CODA, Nomadland, Spotlight)

2) oh wow, this really is a new world (Everything Everywhere All At Once, Parasite, The Shape of Water, Moonlight)

3) come one, you should know better (Green Book and it is a good sign that this has happened only once in the past 10 years)

But then there’s Anora. You can argue putting it into either the 1 or 2 group. I guess you can also do that with Moonlight, but to me it feels like a group 2 movie.

Here’s a personal anecdote from a long time ago: I was at Flow Festival in Helsinki maybe 2014 or around that time. They happened to have two of my favorite bands performing: The Knife on their last tour and My Bloody Valentine, who tour very rarely. Now, while these are great bands and I have deep admiration for both, that was not necessarily the whole crowd.

Neither of these bands is really your typical feelgood artist that you would hear at a club, on radio or on an automatically generated playlists. Or however people find music these days. If it was indeed 2014, I would have been 37 at the time, so I was comparatively old in the crowd of hipsters.

And surprisingly many of them were there specifically to document themselves being there. They did not have much interest in the artists themselves as long as they could get their selfies at the various gigs.

Now, I had a very different emotional responses to this with the different artists.

The Knife were basically only nominally part of the event. They performed, alone except that they did have warmup act, on Wednesday, there was a pause on Thursday and the event itself ran from Friday to Sunday. So, people had to come for The Knife specifically on that day and they had to plan out accommodations and all that stuff (I used the Thursday to visit Bodyworlds at Heureka in Vantaa). Yet, many people in the audience clearly didn’t know what they were there to see. The audience wasn’t really enjoying the music and a lot of people just left. I took this almost personally. This is a very inclusive band that had a very unique vision and made great music. So, how dare all these people not respect that.

My Bloody Valentine is a very different beast. There were plenty of warnings outside and inside the venue that this is going to get loud and, please, please, use ear protection. And it did, indeed, get loud. While they are very noise-y, their music is also very meticulous. There’s a reason why Pitchfork ranked their Loveless as the best albums of 1990s (twice now out of their three lists and it was number two behind Radiohead’s OK Computer in the version they didn’t win). So, when people started to leave, my immediate reaction was basically “THE WEAK SHALL FALL”.

Two bands, two similar situations, two very different reactions from me, because while, again, I love both of these bands, I connect to them very differently on an emotional level.

So, back to Anora. I have only seen the movie once, so I am not ready to say I loved it, but I did like it very much. Maybe after a second viewing I might pump it up to ‘love’, but we’ll see. That echelon is very exclusive.

However, I do kind of love Sean Baker as an artist. I haven’t seen all of his movies, but I have seen Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket, so I feel I have a pretty good grasp on his works.

Part of me is happy that Anora won. It is a very good movie and, while I would have preferred The Substance to win which would have fallen easily into group 2, it is a worthy winner. Even though I mentioned The Substance here, I’m not trying to throw shade, or whatever young people say these days, on Anora. If I had a vote, it would have been an easy number 2 on my list (although I have not seen Nickel Boys and yes, the voters rank the movies).

But there’s a part of me that doesn’t like that Anora won and it has nothing to do with The Substance. Again, it’s just an emotional response. I kind of liked Sean Baker been a secret. Kind of our own thing. This guy who came out with his little movies every couple of years and you could discover them without having to see a trailer once. It was a happy accident. “Oh, this was by the guy who made Tangerine”, “What’s this? Oh, isn’t this Sean Baker that guy who made The Florida Project?”. I like that he is telling these intimate stories about subcultures others of his stature wouldn’t even touch.

But now the secret is out. I don’t quite see him making a Marvel movie in the near future or anything like that. I do think it’s a good sign that his next project is quite small. He isn’t directing, but he is producing a movie by his long-term collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou. I hope he stays on this course, but the cat might be out of the bag and he might be already being courted by the studios for larger projects. And sure, cash out when you can, but that would be a loss in my eyes.