Five films that could win best picture

Writer-director Sean Baker and actor Mikey Madison pose for a portrait.

Nov. 29, 2024 6 AM PT

Crisps, crumbles and cobblers are better than pie? What’s the difference between a crisp and a crumble? I know what a cobbler is and, like Daniel Day-Lewis, I aspire to move to Florence, Italy, someday to study the craft.

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of The Envelope’s Friday newsletter and the guy encouraging his offspring to sign up for one of these classes. Gingerbread can solve most of the world’s problems.

Five movies that could win the best picture Oscar

Here we are, digging out from under all those Thanksgiving dishes and wondering how many servings of mashed potatoes will induce a coma. And still ... no best picture front-runner. In fact, it’s easier to knock holes in the cases for the most prominent contenders than to argue why it’s plausible they might win.

Still, some movie has to win the Oscar. I do wonder if we’ll look back on this time in a few weeks, slap our foreheads and think, “Of course, ‘Anora’ was always going to win,” because by that point it had swept through various precursors. Right now, though, that’s as hard to imagine as the Cowboys making the playoffs. Or Jerry Jones building a stadium where sunlight isn’t an enemy.

Just for fun, I ran down the five leading contenders, the movies that will head the field of 10 nominees. Maybe we can convince ourselves that we’re missing something. Or who knows, maybe we are missing something.

A cardinal looking serious, with other cardinals and choirboys behind him, in a courtyard

Sean Baker and Mikey Madison push the ‘Anora’ vibes to the brink

Have you ever seen a photo of someone you’ve known for years that makes you change how you see them?

I’m looking at an image of filmmaker Sean Baker taken shortly after his open-hearted, screwball adventure “Anora” won the Palme d’Or, the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, an award that Baker never in a million years dreamed he’d ever win. Posing with the Palme, Baker doesn’t look merely happy. Joy radiates from every fiber of his being. It’s the equivalent of Freddie Freeman dropping his bat after hitting that grand slam home run in Game 1 of the World Series. He’s in the moment, but he’s almost out of his body.

Part of that came from the convergence of circumstances onstage that day at the Lumière. Baker had just watched Francis Ford Coppola present George Lucas with an honorary Palme d’Or, something that threw Baker for a loop because those two filmmakers loomed large in his youth. But as he’s listening to Lucas, he’s also processing the fact that, by process of elimination, he thinks his movie might have just won the festival. Which it did.

So now Baker is pulling out a speech that he scratched out on a piece of paper an hour before the ceremony, something he put together so hastily that he still calls it his “junior high speech.”

“And Lucas was on my right watching me deliver it, which was more than a little nerve-racking,” Baker says. “And then we were taking photos, and I’m standing next to him and I thought, ‘OK. I have to say something. I have to tell him something. What am I going to say?’ And I told him I made ‘Space Wars’ in 1978 when I was 7 years old. And I hope he doesn’t sue me.”

Mikey Madison, who play “Anora’s” title character, a Brooklyn stripper who meets and marries the feckless son of a Russian oligarch, has never heard this story.

“Do you think the tape still exists?” she asks of Baker’s Super 8 film. “Because I need to see this.”

“I’m sure it’s just ‘Star Wars’ toys flying around against the star field,” Baker says. “And I’m probably playing Luke Skywalker, and I think my sister was probably Princess Leia.”

We’re sitting in what passes for a green room at the AMC Century City 15, where Madison is signing a thick stack of “Anora” posters, asking me how old I was when I started toying with my signature. Hers — a couple of capital Ms, bracketed by a heart — seems perfectly fine, and I tell her to keep it for now.

What else happened on this Sunday afternoon we spent together recently? Check out our conversation, which answers a few questions you might have about “Anora,” one of the year’s best movies.