Fin: ‘Anora’ and ‘No Other Land’ win at the Oscars, and break people’s brains

Also: Ranking the last ten Best Pictures, don’t invite Kieran Culkin to the Holocaust Museum, the world’s only antisemitic Harvey Weinstein defender, and more in this week’s notes column.

Four people who all did something very, very wrong on Oscar night (Oscars.org)

Two of the topics that make people lose their minds the most are sex and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So it’s perhaps natural that the Academy Award triumphs, this week, of Anora (which won five Oscars including Best Picture) and No Other Land (which won Best Documentary Feature) would lead to several days of some of the most deranged commentary I’ve ever seen, about the Oscars, film, or any other topic.

And I’ve seen takes you wouldn’t believe… starting with the widespread belief that Anora, an R-rated movie with a handful of simulated sex scenes, is “porn.”

We’ve known for a while that a lot of people are incredibly weird about sex in movies, and this is one of those horseshoe theory things where the far left and far right intersect. About the same movie, misogynistic sports commentator Jason Whitlock can call the film “a porno,” while someone on the opposite side of the political spectrum can declare “poor things and anora winning are signs of conservatism and misogyny making a comeback btw.”

There’s also the widespread belief that Sean Baker, the film’s director and four-time winner on Sunday night, is some right-wing hack, and this is based entirely on his social media follows and likes and based on nothing in his work or anything he has ever said.

I assume that Baker is someone with inscrutable, normie politics, who’s conservative enough to think Kyle Rittenhouse might be innocent but liberal enough to make a film in which the protagonists are trans sex workers. And then there was this, from someone who probably hasn’t seen Tangerine:

I posted this the other day and it went super-viral, which I didn’t think was possible anymore on X (welcome, new subscribers!)

Then there’s this:

This is likely only true if you define “prostitute/promiscuous woman” as “a woman who has sex, or thinks about it, at some point during the movie.”

I don’t quite buy the “Demi Moore losing the Oscar to a younger woman proves the point of The Substance” talking point, as it’s a little too close to “All criticism of Don’t Look Up just proves the movie’s point,” but I at least understand it.

Then again, despite all that dipshittery from various directions, Anora still won five Oscars. And yes, the post-Oscars discourse after a win by The Brutalist probably would have been way worse.

Then there’s No Other Land. In this space one week ago, I noticed that while numerous media accounts had looked at how the film was universally acclaimed but had failed to gain distribution, no one who was conservative or outwardly Zionist seemed to have engaged with the film at all. I also predicted that the Zionist right would go scorched-earth on the film immediately if it won, and that’s exactly what happened.

One leading light of the "post-October 7 influencer” world declared the film “thoroughly debunked,” despite not doing any debunking. One major Facebook page called the film “a documentary made by Hamas” (it was shot in the West Bank and has nothing to do with Gaza, October 7 or Hamas.) The Daily Wire wrote about “The Truth About The Oscar-Winning Anti-Israel Documentary ‘No Other Land,” but did nothing other than quote an Israeli NGO; I’m not sure if the author of the piece has even seen the film.

I was also surprised to learn that there’s also a pro-Palestinian case against No Other Land, mostly from people who disagree with an Israeli, Yuval Abraham, being part of the filmmaking team. One much-read post denounced Abraham as “the liberal zionist co-agent,” and alleged that he “hops on the back of Palestinian pain and rides that wave as he makes a name for himself, and money.”

Yea, No Other Land is a low-budget documentary that doesn’t have distribution. I don’t think there was much “money” in it for anyone.