The 97th Academy Awards, held March 2, proved to be a celebration of independent films with big wins for “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” “Flow,” “A Real Pain,” “The Substance” and “Conclave.” Even “Anora” and “The Brutalist” alone had a combined win of eight awards, while big name movies like “Wicked” and “Dune: Part Two” won much fewer (two awards each) and in more technical categories. This significant win for independent films suggests these movies may be getting a resurgence after many years of being set aside.
Independent films first took over the industry in the 1990s with movies like “Pulp Fiction,” “The Virgin Suicides” and “Hard Eight.” At this time, film festivals were built specifically around finding new voices for studios to fund. However the popularity of these films started to decrease drastically in the 2000s when studios stopped looking for completely independent filmmakers and instead brought their own studio films to festivals, weeding out smaller filmmakers from the festival market.
Compared to big-name films, independent films have always been at a disadvantage, especially due to their tight budgets. “Anora” had a budget of only $6 million. While this still seems like a significant amount of money, when you compare it to the estimated $145 million budget for “Wicked,” it exemplifies how little $6 million is in the film industry. And yet, despite this major difference in budgets, “Anora” still managed to sweep the night, winning awards for Best Actress in a Leading Role, Best Directing, Best Film Editing, Best Writing (Original Screenplay) and, most notably, Best Picture.
“Flow,” the Latvian animated film, had a budget of less than $4 million and was animated entirely on Blender, a free open-source software. Comparatively, most Pixar films are animated using a variety of high-grade and in-house software, including Autodesk Maya and RenderMan, and typically have a budget of around $200 million. Once again, “Flow” pulled ahead of its big-name competitors, including “Inside Out 2,” winning the award for Best Animated Feature Film.
Independent films have much less resources than those produced by well-known studios. Rather than let this be a limitation, independent filmmakers embrace their restrictions and use creativity to work around these problems, making original and distinctive films. While independent films have gotten nominations in the past, they tend to lose to bigger productions, so it is refreshing to finally see independent filmmakers’ inventiveness get recognized by big awards shows.
Neon, the independent film production and distribution company that distributed “Anora,” has now won two Best Picture Academy Awards, the first being for “Parasite” in 2020. This is an achievement that not even big studios like Disney or Netflix have accomplished. Additionally, in accepting four awards for “Anora” during a single night, Sean Baker, the director, writer, editor and producer of the film, achieved a feat only accomplished by one other person, Walt Disney. However, Baker became the first person to ever receive four Academy Awards for a singular film.
Baker told reporters after the Oscars: “We always jump into these projects knowing we will have to compete with films that have budgets almost 100 times what we shot our film for, when we're actually able to [...] get into the same room as films such as 'Wicked,' it means we're doing something right."
This new recognition of independent films shows that there’s a bright future for the medium. I believe we are starting to make our way back to the thriving scene for independent films of the ‘90s with studios like Neon and A24 going back to film festivals’ origins by searching for one-of-a-kind stories to fund and distribute worldwide.
Hopefully this trend will continue in the future, and we will see a rise of independent films getting wider theatrical releases and higher recognition. This will also pave the way for more independent filmmakers to be able to bring their stories to life and become successful filmmakers.
