Dubious honors of the thaw

I wouldn’t label Anora as the most weak among movies ever winning the Best Picture Oscar and the Palme d’Or at Cannes in the same year; this dubious honor, in my eyes, proudly belongs to Marty from 1955. Albeit such conjunctions are quite rare by and far, happening only four times in history, so we couldn’t say that the sample is representative enough.

It’s definitely quite a weak movie, relative exotics for an American watchers aside, but I totally understand that its cornucopia of awards is but a symbolic harbinger of the colossal thaw in Russo-American relations. So I’m very glad to see Anora triumphant despite the obvious triteness… Something something Slava Ukraini or DEI/MeToo would have been atrocious to see so honoured in 2025.

Any other time, I’d feel an awkwardness stumbling upon Anora in the same historical list of winners and nominees with The Leopard or The Bridges of Madison County: in the latter case, the source material is equally vapid, but the end result turns out strikingly different from an aesthetical point of view.

Ah yes, by the way, I have nothing in principle against sex workers; on the contrary, I think that their work should be decriminalized as wide as possible; ditto pornography.

I just can’t shake off a feeling that Brother 2, which gained a cult following in Russia and neighbouring countries, deserved such an accolade much more, when judged according to the pure cinematic merit as a Zeitgeist-saturated thriller about Russian arriving to America to deal with his own business — and devils.