The 97th annual Academy Awards have concluded with a near-sweep for the indie darling Anora, which won five of the six categories it was nominated in.Many of those wins came in the most competitive fields of the night: Best Actress, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing.
And at the conclusion of Sunday’s awards ceremony, Anora also scored the biggest prize of all, Best Picture.
It trounced the duelling musicals Emilia Perez and Wicked, which received 13 and 10 nominations, respectively — but won only two Oscars apiece.
It also proved to be a bigger crowd-pleaser among the Academy voters than another independent film favourite, The Brutalist, which picked up three wins out of 10 nominations.
But some of the biggest takeaways of the evening did not come in the final tally of who gobbled up the most Oscars. Instead, they came in the ideals espoused on the Oscars stage: bold statements underscoring the need for justice and an acknowledgement of our shared humanity.
Here are five major themes that emerged from tonight’s Oscar awards.
Basel Adra, left, and Yuval Abraham shared a win for Best Documentary Feature [John Locher/AP Photo]
No Other Land’s powerful message about ethnic cleansing
One of the biggest surprises of the night came in the competitive Best Documentary Feature category, when the film No Other Land was named the winner. Advertisement
The film chronicles the destruction of the Palestinian hamlets of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank, where one of the film’s direct …
