When Sean Baker’s Anora premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, few doubted its critical potency. What was less certain, however, was how far its success could travel into the traditionally conservative terrain of American awards season. By the time the film swept five major Academy Awards—including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Mikey Madison, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing—it became clear that Anora had broken a long-standing taboo in Hollywood: a film centered on a sex worker not only being taken seriously, but celebrated.

But Anora’s ascension did not happen in a vacuum. It belongs to a lineage of films that have attempted to tell stories of women in the sex industry with empathy, drama, and wit—and yet were often met with resistance, if not outright dismissal. In this light, comparisons to Pretty Woman (1990) and Hustlers (2019) are not only inevitable but essential. All three films feature charismatic leads playing sex workers who navigate transactional relationships with men, often discovering personal power along the way. And yet only Anora was allowed to fully graduate from genre entertainment to awards-season prestige. Why?

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The Ghosts of Pretty Woman and Hustlers

Pretty Woman, directed by Garry Marshall, was a box-office juggernaut and remains one of the most iconic romantic comedies of all time. Julia Roberts’ performance as Vivian Ward, a sex worker with a heart of gold, became career-defining. Her charm, comedic timing, and radiant vulnerability earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. But the film itself—despite massive commercial success and cultural impact—was never taken seriously by the Academy in categories beyond Roberts’ performance.

And how could it be? Pretty Woman was, in its bones, a sanitized fairy tale. It took the contours of Pygmalion and draped them in designer shopping montages and balcony roses. Sex work was not examined so much as it was glossed over—Vivian’s profession served as colorful backstory, not sociopolitical texture. The film promised transformation, not confrontation. It reassured audiences (and voters) that its heroine could be “redeemed” by love and wealth, not that her current life was worthy of dignity on its own terms.

Fast forward nearly three decades, and Hustlers attempted a far more complicated dance. Lorene Scafaria’s adaptation of a New York Magazine article chronicled the lives of strippers who, after the 2008 financial collapse, began drugging and scamming their wealthy Wall Street clients. The film was audacious, vibrant, and unapologetically female in its gaze. At the center was Jennifer Lopez as Ramona Vega—a magnetic performance that fused sensuality, power, and pathos.

Lopez was widely considered a frontrunner for a Best Supporting Actress nomination, having garnered accolades from critics’ groups, a SAG nomination, and a Golden Globe nod. But when the Oscar nominations were announced in January 2020, her name was conspicuously absent. The snub was more than just surprising—it became a flashpoint in a broader conversation about who the Academy sees as “serious” actresses, and which performances are deemed respectable. That Lopez—a pop icon and Hollywood veteran—delivered what many considered her best work in a film about strippers and still couldn’t crack the nominations spoke volumes about the Academy’s implicit hierarchies.

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Enter Anora

Anora, by contrast, had everything working against it on paper. Directed by Sean Baker—known for low-budget, vérité-style films like Tangerine and The Florida Project—the movie stars Mikey Madison as Anora “Ani” Mikheeva, a 23-year-old stripper from Brooklyn who impulsively marries the sweet but clueless son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn). The marriage sets off an international fiasco, with the oligarch’s family descending on New York in an attempt to annul the union, reclaim the son, and erase Ani from the narrative.

The premise could have leaned easily into satire or melodrama. But Baker, ever the humanist, gives Ani the space to be more than an archetype. She is not a wide-eyed dreamer (Pretty Woman) or a cynical operator (Hustlers). Instead, Ani is a contradiction—streetwise yet emotionally raw, calculating yet spontaneous, unglamorous yet magnetic. She is a full person, not a metaphor or stand-in. This grounding allows Anora to engage in a deeper exploration of class, gender, and post-Soviet diaspora politics—elements rarely afforded to stories about sex workers on screen.

Mikey Madison’s performance is the fulcrum around which this emotional and tonal balance operates. Known previously for her supporting turns in Better Things, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and Scream, Madison is a revelation here. Her Ani bristles with kinetic energy, yet reveals quiet moments of heartbreak and hesitation that feel lived-in and deeply earned. She never plays the character for sympathy or tragedy. Instead, she makes Ani’s contradictions the heart of the film—tough and tender, reckless and self-aware.

It’s no wonder the Academy responded. Madison’s performance is not just awards-worthy—it fits squarely within the tradition of Oscar-winning turns by actresses playing layered, morally ambiguous characters. But unlike Lopez’s Ramona, who was both glamorized and criminalized, or Roberts’ Vivian, who was reformed through romance, Ani is never rewritten to suit an audience’s comfort. She simply is.

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Timing, Politics, and Perspective

Anora’s critical and commercial success—grossing $56.6 million worldwide on a $6 million budget—also reflects a broader cultural shift. By 2024, the Academy had continued to diversify its membership in terms of age, nationality, race, and gender. This changing voter base is more receptive to global storytelling, social realism, and unconventional narratives. Films that once would have been considered too “small” or too “taboo” now stand a real chance—if they are told with conviction and artistry.

There is also the matter of prestige. While Pretty Woman was a glossy studio rom-com and Hustlers a commercial crowd-pleaser, Anora arrived with the imprimatur of the Cannes Film Festival. Winning the Palme d’Or positioned it as an auteur’s work, elevating its subject matter through the lens of international acclaim. The film’s success became not just a statement about the story itself, but a referendum on the Academy’s evolution—a way to signal openness to challenging, politically resonant work.

Still, it is hard to ignore the double standards that linger. Lopez, a Latina actress playing a working-class woman of color, delivered a performance in Hustlers that was arguably more transformative and physically demanding than many of that year’s nominees. And yet she was overlooked. Would Madison have been as embraced by the Academy if she, too, were a woman of color playing a stripper? Would Anora have been taken seriously without Baker’s reputation for centering marginalized voices in tender, observational dramas?

These are uncomfortable but necessary questions. The truth is that representation in Hollywood has always been uneven—less about the story being told than about who is telling it, and who gets to be taken seriously.

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A New Canon

Despite these questions, Anora’s Oscar triumph marks a turning point. It didn’t just win—it swept. It outpaced big-budget contenders and legacy studio campaigns. It transformed a niche indie into the cultural center of gravity for the year. And in doing so, it gave narrative dignity to a sex worker character without romanticizing, demonizing, or moralizing her existence.

For all its power, Anora never asks Ani to change in order to earn love, respect, or legitimacy. That alone separates it from most films in its thematic orbit. Where Pretty Woman offered a fantasy and Hustlers a cautionary tale, Anora gives us a character study that feels both urgently modern and quietly revolutionary

It took 34 years to get from Vivian Ward to Ani Mikheeva. It may take more still to close the gap between what women live and what Hollywood honors. But if Anora signals anything, it’s that the future belongs not just to the rescued, but to those who insist on being seen—flaws, fury, brilliance, and all.

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