#Sean Baker’s Oscar success was a big win for the little guy

Prior to the 2025 Oscars there was very little linking Sean Baker, the indie filmmaker behind Anora, to Walt Disney. By the time the ceremony ended, however, they became aligned in history as the only people in history to have won four individual Academy Awards in one night. It’s a mindblowing stat that shows both the unprecedented nature of Anora’s success and Baker’s control over his own movies: his wins included best original screenplay and editing, disciplines many directors don’t typically handle themselves, particularly the latter. But then, Baker is not a typical Oscar winner; he is a darling of the indie underground whose films largely center those on the margins of America fighting to survive in a system built to challenge their existence. With an increasingly changing Academy that’s clearly more keen to celebrate arthouse and independent movies, his win is a beacon of hope for anyone demoralized by blockbuster franchises and bland IP expansions.

Anora is a screwball comedy about a stripper and escort who blurs the lines between transaction and romance with a goofy Russian heir. It’s high-energy, laugh-out-loud funny, and mixes its hijinks with a stark portrait of how the gap between those with money and without is wider than ever. Collecting the Oscar for best director on Sunday night, Baker, who works closely alongside his wife, Samantha Quan, shouted out the sex worker community. “They have shared their stories, they have shared their life experiences with me over the years. My deepest respect, thank you. I share this with you,” he said.

Baker’s films have touched on the lives of sex workers since he first emerged in the early 2000s, but sharpened into focus with his 2015 breakout Tangerine. Set on Christmas eve, it’s a story about two trans women fresh out of jail who hunt down a partner who has been cheating. The lo-fi approach (a lot was made of the movie being shot on iPhones) introduced Baker’s slice-of-life style and watching it back now, the comic and wild energy feels like a precursor to Anora. Baker then followed that with 2017’s The Florida Project. Again, that film explores themes of financial instability and the knock-on effects of being forced to live paycheck to paycheck. Set in a motel, the movie follows young Moonee, whose loving mom Halley works at a nearby strip club. Baker’s framing of the story is quietly radical, showing the precarity of the gig worker economy and making those who are struggling to get by heroes, not a warning for the rest of society.

That’s not to say the average Baker protagonist is a liberal fantasy of a blue collar worker. In 2021’s Red Rocket, perhaps his finest movie to date, actor Simon Rex plays Mikey Saber, a washed-up adult performer with a deluded belief that a comeback is inevitable. Saber is manipulative in his romantic pursuit of a 17-year-old teenager named Strawberry, and Baker doesn’t shy away from exposing his sleazy behavior for what it is. And yet, the movie is nuanced enough to zoom out and ask why he is like this, framing the showbiz dream as little more than a con that creates more victims than it does stars.

Baker, an upper-middle-class guy from New Jersey, has long acknowledged his outsider status when it comes to his subject matter and compares his films to non-fiction story-telling, saying he wants his films to “feel as real as a documentary.” When he has been asked why he gravitates toward these stories, he says he sees it as important to put characters on screen that don’t normally get a chance to tell their stories. His films, Anora included, when viewed together represent a body of work that is probing, raw, and deeply human. It’s refreshing that Anora’s Oscars success is not down to a mainstream pivot or commercial compromise, but rather recognition that small films matter just as much as blockbusters, and that the future of an industry under increased threat might just lie in giving these movies a platform to prosper.

Baker seems keenly aware of this fact, too. Using his best director acceptance speech to issue a “battle cry” for movie theaters, he told filmmakers to “keep making films for the big screen. I know I will.” He shouted out his mom for giving him a love of movies by taking him to see things in theaters as a child and also held studios and distributors accountable for ensuring that theatrical release is made more of a priority in an economy that has tipped unhelpfully in the direction of streaming and home rental. Like Chappell Roan at the 2025 Grammys, Baker took advantage of an unlikely platform to directly address the powerful industry figures in the room and continued his career-long mission of spotlighting those for whom tomorrow is not a certainty. “In a time in which the world can feel very divided, this is more important than ever,” he said, pointing out that 1000 screens have closed in the U.S. since 2020. “It’s a communal experience you don’t get at home. And right now, the theater-going experience is under threat.”

Baker’s commitment to indie cinema is what makes his dominance of the 2025 Oscars feel different. He has previously spoken about how making low-budget movies (Anora was made with just $6 million) is not a calling card to get him a gig on the next thing off the Marvel conveyor belt, but an artistic necessity. No doubt following this sweep, he will be offered many blank checks as he looks to his next project. But with big money comes big interference, and an auteur who writes, directs, edits, and casts his own movies has more reason to resist the dollar signs flashing before his eyes than most. It’s worth noting Mikey Madison, the star of Anora and winner of best actress this year, is refreshingly offline in an era when how many Instagram followers you have are aligned to career opportunities. Would Baker have been able to cast such a relative unknown if his budget was ten times as large? It seems unlikely.

Even on the biggest night of his career, Baker kept things lowkey. A report from the Vanity Fair afterparty noted that he and Quan turned up later than most after going home to walk their dog, Bunsen. No doubt it gave the couple time to decompress and reflect on a night that puts them in the history books — a suitably real way to (briefly) escape the Hollywood madness to which they have long represented a distinct alternative.