As Sean Baker accepted his richly deserved Best Director Oscar for Anora at the 97th Academy Awards, the auteur made a fantastic plea for independent theatrical cinema to keep on thriving. His speech didn’t just reaffirm the precariousness of theaters in the wake of COVID-19 shutting these places down in March 2020. It was also a reminder of how few Best Picture Oscar winners have been truly independent features. This Academy Award category has belonged mainly to major studio releases dating back to its very first ceremonies.
With Anora making history as one of the cheapest Best Picture winners in the 97-year history of the Academy Awards, it’s worth asking … what other independent Best Picture Oscar winners have appeared throughout history?
When talking about independent cinema, I’m not counting films from arthouse labels owned by big corporations and/or entities that are siblings to one of the Major Studios (a term referring to entities like Disney, Warner Bros., and Universal). This includes Fox Searchlight and its News Corp. or Disney ownership, or Miramax, which had its Best Picture winners distributed by Disney. This would also exclude Apple TV+. I’ve also opted to exclude United Artists releases, since the studio is historically considered a “mini-major” despite being widely thought of as an independent entity.
With those caveats out of the way, it’s clear that the majority of the first few decades of Best Picture winners belonged to titles either financed or distributed by major studios. Paramount predecessor Famous Players-Lasky took home the first Best Picture trophy with Wings, but after that, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., and Columbia Pictures (plus mini-major RKO) ruled the roost. Independent entity Selznick International Pictures did produce Gone with the Wind and Rebecca, but the former was a co-production deal with mammoth studio MGM, and the latter was distributed by United Artists. That’s a far cry from Moonlight, Spotlight, and Anora being made and released far away from the eyes of major studio executives!
1948’s Hamlet came closest to really bursting this dominance since it was a British film produced by J. Arthur Rank-Two Cities Films, though Universal Pictures still distributed it in the U.S. Even into the 1970s, when the dissolving of the Hays Code opened new doors for what kinds of films could be produced, Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and United Artists still dominated the entire decade of Best Picture Oscar winners. Amadeus, which was distributed by Orion Pictures, is the first Best Picture winner (at the 57th Academy Awards in 1985) to take home the Best Picture trophy with no distribution from one of the major or mini-major studios.
Titles made outside of the U.S. like Hamlet or A Man For All Seasons had won the award before, but they’d still had major U.S. studios handling distribution and award season campaigns. Amadeus broke the seal on true blue indie cinema winning the biggest Oscar around. Orion Pictures would continue to score a handful of further Best Picture wins for titles like Dances with Wolves before its initial closure in the early ’90s. After this, DreamWorks SKG would be the next indie studio to take home Best Picture statues for American Beauty and Gladiator, though the latter title was a costly blockbuster that had Universal Pictures co-financing from the get-go. In the 2000s, Crash and The Hurt Locker were two indie films purchased by Lionsgate and Summit Entertainment, respectively, that were especially transformative for indie cinema winning Best Picture.
It turned out that titles beyond just those brewed in-house by Orion Pictures and DreamWorks SKG could also get Best Picture Oscars. The Hurt Locker in 2010 at the 82nd Academy Awards especially was transformative in how it began a shift toward the Oscars embracing indie cinema more often than not in the Best Picture category. For the first nine years of the 21st century, seven of the nine Best Picture winners were either major studio efforts or hailed from arthouse labels owned by conglomerates like TimeWarner. Only three of the ten 1990s Best Picture winners were indie films. Meanwhile, Kathryn Bigelow’s 2009 Oscar victory was the first of eight indie cinema Best Pictures winners over the last 16 Oscar ceremonies. Roughly 50 percent of the last 16 Academy Awards have seen the biggest prize go to something made beyond the studio system.
The Weinstein Company, Neon, and A24 each have two of those titles, with Summit (The Hurt Locker) and Open Road Films (Spotlight) each having one Best Picture winner. This shift is even starker when looking at the Best Picture winners started with the 88th Academy Awards giving Spotlight this award in 2016. Five of those eight winners have come from just the last ten years! Anora’s far from the first indie movie to take home the Best Picture Oscar, but it does crystallize how much indie cinema is driving the award season circuit these days. With major studios and even big arthouse labels abandoning mid-budget films and festival acquisitions, a void has emerged that A24, Neon, and others have been all too happy to fill.
This also goes hand-in-hand with the global broadening of Academy voter membership. It turns out that not everyone on the planet thinks the best movie of the year is just one holiday season title Warner Bros. or Columbia Pictures put out! With the increasing prevalence of indie cinema in the Best Picture category, the idea of what an Oscar winner in this domain looks like is becoming excitingly fluid. Don’t expect Anora to be the last Best Picture Oscar winner reflecting the modern Academy Awards dominance of independent cinema. On the contrary, it’s just the most recent example of this strain of filmmaking becoming a Best Picture fixture after being so often overshadowed by major studio fare!
