Sean Baker has won the best director Oscar for Anora at the Academy Awards, which are taking place in Los Angeles, California.

A romance/thriller about a lapdancer who impulsively marries a Russian playboy, Anora stars Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn. It is Baker’s eighth feature, having made his debut with the microbudget indie Four Letter Words in 2000, and his fourth film since making a breakthrough in 2015 with Tangerine, a drama about trans sex workers shot on iPhones.

Anora has already scored a series of awards for Baker, winning the Palme d’Or after its world premiere at the Cannes film festival in 2024. Baker also won best director at the Independent Spirit awards, and the Directors Guild of America prize for feature film. This was Baker’s first Oscar best director nomination, and he defeated a strong line-up including Brady Corbet for The Brutalist, James Mangold for A Complete Unknown and Coralie Fargeat for The Substance.

The director issued a rallying call in support of independent film at the Spirit awards, where Anora won three prizes. “Indie film is struggling right now more than ever,” Baker said. “The system has to change, because this is simply unsustainable. Let’s not undervalue ourselves any longer.” At the Oscars he went further, issuing what he called a “battle cry” for the survival of movie theatres. “Cinema a communal experience you don’t simply get at home. And right now it is under threat”, he said, before noting that during the pandemic “we lost nearly 1000 screens in the US”.

Baker called on film-makers to “keep making films for the big screen”, and for distributors to keep distributing them. And he encouraged parents to keep taking their children to see films at the cinema, citing his mother as an example on him.

“My mother introduced me to the cinema when I was five years old,” he said. “Today is also her birthday. Happy birthday mum. This is for you.”

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