When Sean Baker’s Anora premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, it was easy to mistake it for another tale of impulsive love wrapped in neon. After all, a New York stripper (Mikey Madison) marrying the son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn) in Las Vegas sounds like the stuff of tabloid dreams. But behind its glitz, Anora taps into a fascinating American legal and cultural institution: the Vegas marriage.

With Anora sweeping the 97th Academy Awards—including Best Picture and Best Actress for Mikey Madison—it’s worth asking: how accurate is this storyline? Could a high-stakes wedding like Ani and Ivan’s really happen in Vegas? Spoiler alert: it absolutely could. And it has.

Let’s take a look at the real history behind Sin City nuptials—and how Anora dramatizes it with surprising authenticity.

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The Birth of the Vegas Wedding

Las Vegas earned its reputation as the marriage capital of America largely by accident. In 1931, Nevada legalized quickie divorces and eliminated mandatory waiting periods for marriages—making it one of the most accessible places in the U.S. for impulsive romance (or scandal control).

It didn’t take long for wedding chapels to pop up along Fremont Street and, later, the Strip. By the 1950s, Vegas weddings had become part of pop culture, boosted by celebrity ceremonies like those of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and later, Britney Spears’ famously annulled 55-hour marriage in 2004.

Vegas turned love into a low-barrier industry: no blood tests, no waiting period, no judgment. Just a government-issued ID, a marriage license ($102 as of 2024), and two consenting adults.

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Anora’s Impulsive Nuptials: Realistic or Not?

In Anora, Ani and Ivan meet during a wild weekend, fall for each other (or something like it), and seal the deal in a Vegas chapel. What follows is a series of cultural clashes, power struggles, and an almost operatic unraveling of the fantasy.

Despite its absurd premise, the legal aspect of Ani and Ivan’s marriage is strikingly plausible.

Under Nevada law:

There is no residency requirement: Visitors can marry on the spot, just like Ani and Ivan.

The marriage is legally binding worldwide (so long as the participants aren’t already married).

An international annulment or divorce can be complicated, especially if one party is from a country with different family laws—as dramatized in Anora through Ivan’s Russian oligarch father and legal entourage.

The film doesn’t fabricate drama for drama’s sake—it leans into the real-world consequences of a legal marriage made on a whim. That includes the complexities of annulment, inheritance concerns, and family intervention.

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Vegas Weddings and the American Dream

What Anora captures best is the symbolic weight of a Vegas wedding: it’s the ultimate shortcut to legitimacy. For Ani, it’s a chance to transcend class and social stigma. For Ivan, it’s rebellion masquerading as romance. And for the audience, it’s a reminder that love, legality, and fantasy often blur under the lights of Las Vegas.

Baker’s choice to film Anora in a mix of gritty vérité and dreamlike saturation underscores this tension. Vegas is a place where anything feels possible, and yet everything has consequences.

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What History Tells Us

While Vegas weddings are often seen as jokes or punchlines, they’ve been real life-changers for thousands of couples—from soldiers on leave during WWII to celebrities dodging paparazzi. They’ve been used to gain immigration status, rush inheritances, or—more often than not—just to say “I do” without a fuss.

The city’s wedding industry still handles over 70,000 marriages per year. That’s more than anywhere else in the U.S. Many of those marriages last. Many don’t. But every one is legal—and emotionally loaded.

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Final Thoughts: Anora as Cultural Time Capsule

With Anora, Sean Baker doesn’t just tell a love story—he archives a deeply American phenomenon. In doing so, he reclaims the Vegas wedding from satire and shows us its power as a mirror: reflecting ambition, desperation, spontaneity, and, yes, sometimes love.

Ani’s story may be extreme, but the history behind it is very real. And like all good history, it’s more human—and more absurd—than fiction ever dares to be.

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Related Reads:

How Reno Became ‘the Divorce Capital of the World’—And Why That Reputation Faded

Anora is available now with a subscription to Hulu…