Oscar Best Picture Winners Are Getting Smaller—And That’s a Good Thing
Depending on whom you listen to, as a society we no longer care about the Oscars: the movies are dead, long live streaming product. Or we care about the Oscars too much—don’t people know there are wars going on? Do we care, should we care, is there really anything left there to care about? It seems, now that the 2025 edition is in the rear-view mirror—a ceremony during which Sean Baker’s independently made Anora won a total of five Academy Awards—that many of us care more than we may even admit to ourselves. And it’s not because the pictures have gotten bigger; it’s because they’ve gotten smaller.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Not so long ago we pretty much knew an Oscar-winning movie when we saw one coming. The King’s Speech, 12 Years a Slave, Birdman, Green Book: these films were either tony prestige products, or in some way attempted to address lofty social issues that we, as a nation of moviegoers, either genuinely cared about or professed to care about. Even the minor surprise of a movie like The Artist winning Best Picture made sense in retrospect: Hollywood has always loved flattering itself, and a movie riffing on its storied silent past was bound to find love among Academy members.
And then things began to change, not suddenly but gradually. In the Academy’s eyes, smaller, riskier independent films—like Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight—began to outshine costlier, splashier, big-studio movies. After the Oscars So White campaign of 2015, the makeup of the Academy changed, too. And most of the Best Picture winners over the past five years—Parasite (which also took the prize for Best International Film), Nomadland, Coda, and Everything Everywhere All at Once—emerged from unexpected origins other than a big American studio. Even last year’s Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer, arguably landed where it did because its director, Christopher Nolan, unhappy with the terms his usual studio, Warner Bros., had offered for his previous film Tenet, shrewdly kept production costs low(under $100 million, not much for a picture of that scale) and negotiated a relatively luxurious theatrical-release window with the studio that ultimately released the film, Universal. In other words, he was thinking once again like an indie filmmaker, which is what you’ve got to do these days to exert any kind of artistic authority as a filmmaker.
Read more: Our Film Critic’s Favorite 2025 Oscar Nominees
This last Oscars race in general, and Baker’s film in particular, only reinforce that trend. We can’t even accurately call it the rise of the indie film, because this trend has been bubbling for years now, first as we were in the thick of the pandemic and then as we figured out how to climb out of it. At this point, it would be an anomaly for any film financed and released by one of the big five studios—Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros., Walt Disney Studios, or Sony—to win an Oscar.
How did we get here? There’s no need even to ask that question: greed. We all know that Hollywood’s first aim has always been to make money. Even so, studios loved financing big “awards bait” movies because those pictures allegedly reflected their own moral values, as well as their devotion to craft and tradition. Awards were considered part of the payoff for the marvelous artistic achievements those studios were either actually producing or believed they were producing.
But now that the big studios are generally so fixated on profits—either PVOD profits or some hybrid model that may include only a cursory theatrical release—independent films, or films made by the mini-majors, like A24, are coming to form the bulk of what we consider “Oscar-worthy” movies. On Oscar night, when Baker expressed gratitude that his small film had managed to stack up against movies costing many millions of dollars, he wasn’t wrong. Yet in the current landscape, a film like his has a much better chance than Wicked of winning Best Picture. Wicked was of course the bigger, splashier box-office hit. But in just going about making the movie he wanted to make—on a tiny budget, which is his usual way of working—Baker inadvertently provided something that felt fresh and appealing: a romantic fractured-fairytale screwball comedy about a terrifically likable young woman from Brighton Beach just trying to find happiness any way she knows how, as opposed to an overcooked musical that is, quite simply, just too long and trying too hard in every way.
You can love both Wicked and Anora. But one of these movies represents a formula that doesn’t work as well as it used to. And if the heads of these relatively new studio-streamer hybrids are more interested in making money than in winning awards, which seems to be the case, they’re certainly getting their wish. If they did care about Oscar victories, then smaller, independent filmmakers would be their main competition. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist won awards for Best Original Score and Best Cinematography, and its star, Adrien Brody, took the Best Actor prize. Corbet made the film, largely shot in Hungary, for only $10 million, a tiny amount for an ambitious epic. Similar resourcefulness seems to have been key for most of this year’s Oscar winners and contenders: Jesse Eisenberg made his modest but affecting drama A Real Pain (for which Kieran Culkin took the Best Supporting Actor award) the old-fashioned indie way, on the cheap; it was picked up by Searchlight after premiering at Sundance. And Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis made his gorgeous animated environmental parable Flow—the first independent animated feature to win in the Oscars’ Animation category—entirely using open-source software. You can’t get more un-Pixar than that.
It may be true that some of these movies gave us better theater outside the cinema than in it. Jacques Audiard’s audacious but controversial musical Emilia Pérez, released by Netflix, saw its Oscar chances plummet after it was revealed that one of its stars, Karla Sofía Gascón, had a history of making racist remarks on social media. (Even so, her costar Zoe Saldaña won Best Supporting Actress.) And French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s somewhat unfocused body-horror film The Substance took home only one prize, for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. But it did give us one of the best pre-game runs in recent awards history: Although Demi Moore didn’t win the Best Actress award she was nominated for, the earnest warmth of the speeches she gave as she accepted the awards she did win, at the Golden Globes and SAG, made her the kind of contender you wanted to root for.
Read more: Demi Moore and the Faulty Notion of ‘Serious’ Acting
That’s the sort of goodwill big studios can’t buy—and don’t care to anymore, anyway. And maybe this is just the development we need, to save the idea of movies as we’ve always known them. Accepting his speech for Best Director, Baker noted that all movie theaters, especially those that are independently owned, are struggling. “If we don’t reverse this trend, we’ll be losing a vital part of our culture,” he continued. “This is my battle cry. Filmmakers, keep making films for the big screen. I know I will.”
Baker’s Anora victory is that much sweeter when you consider that this is a guy who once made a wonderful feature, 2015’s Tangerine, on an iPhone. He’s the walking, talking embodiment of possibility. Meanwhile, it’s the streaming conglomerates who are eroding the legacy of Hollywood, while younger, more resourceful filmmakers work to keep it alive, sometimes at their own expense. Maybe, increasingly, the Oscars at least provide a roadmap for viewers/consumers who want to care about movies—who want to see them big, whenever possible, even though in many parts of the country they might need to drive 100 miles (or more) to do so. Even then, when watching a film on the big screen just isn’t possible, maybe it still means something to hear and read about a film—to have some anticipatory feeling—before you have a chance to watch it at home.
Why do we care about artistry at all? Maybe the point is that if we do care, we need to make a little bit of an effort to seek it out, even if that just means waiting for a movie to come to the closest screen, wherever that may be. Either way, it’s time to acknowledge that independently made or smaller films aren’t gaining ground on the awards playing field; they are the playing field, the new version of what we call Hollywood, even if they’re not necessarily emerging from the traditional Hollywood-studio path. This is a good thing, the only thing that’s going to push movies into the future. Forget the greedy streamers: leave the job of filmmaking to people who care, to people like Corbet and Eisenberg, Fargeat and Zilbalodis. As for Baker: According to New York Times journalist Kyle Buchanan, he arrived late to his own celebratory Oscar party. He’d gone home first to walk his dog. Now that’s commitment.