Between Anora, The Brutalist and Flow, the 2025 Oscars was a triumph for independent filmmaking

Avatar: The Way of Water had a production budget upwards of $US350 million. For that amount of money, the studio could’ve made 58 Anoras. Or 35 The Brutalists or 100 Flows.

The 2025 Oscars were a triumph for independent filmmaking and proof that you don’t have to spend big to make profitable art and win Oscars.

Anora was the major winner at this year’s Academy Awards, claiming victory in five out of the six categories in which it was nominated. It was crowned best picture, best actress for Mikey Madison and director, screenplay and editing for Sean Baker.

With four statuettes, Baker equalled the record for most individual Oscar wins in a single year, with only Walt Disney having accomplished the feat previously, in 1954.

The comedy-drama caper tells the story of a sex worker/dancer who elopes with the son of a Russian oligarch after a heady week together. But when his parents find out and insist on an annulment, her new husband absconds, forcing her and his parents’ goons to chase him across New York.

It’s a riotous, fast-paced and unpredictable film, shot on location in the city and on film for only $US6 million.

Baker, 54, is a stalwart of the independent filmmaking scene who has spent his career telling the stories of marginalised people including sex workers, itinerants, and former porn stars, and he does it with deep compassion and respect for their humanity.

He has never worked within the studio system and remains proudly scrappy and independent.

For his 2015 film Tangerine, he shot the film on three iPhones and the whole budget ran to $160,000. His 2017 film The Florida Project was made for $3.2 million and scored Willem Dafoe an Oscar nomination.

In accepting the best picture Oscar, Baker said, “I want to thank the Academy for recognising a fully independent film. This film was made in the blood, sweat and tears of indie artists, and long live independent film.”

It’s a vindication, especially as Anora has grossed just under $65 million at global box office, including about $2m in Australia.

The second biggest winner of the evening was The Brutalist, which picked up three Oscars including for Adrien Brody in best actor. It was nominated for 10 gongs overall.

The Brutalist was famously a long and difficult production. After his financing failed more than once, it took its director, co-writer, and producer Brady Corbet seven years to complete it.

In the end, Corbet had to make the movie in Hungary to stretch out his $16 million budget. That amount of money is astonishing when you see what Corbet did with it – he made a three-and-a-half hour historical epic that was filmed on 35mm VistaVision.

Corbet, too, is a singular, uncompromising artist whose two previous works, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, were made independently.

Then there’s Latvian film Flow, which was nominated for two awards and won in the animated feature category.

Created on open-source software and made for $5.7 million, it beat out the favourite The Wild Robot, which had a budget of $125 million and came from Universal’s animation juggernaut, Dreamworks.

Sometimes, commentators call out the Oscars for fawning over movies no one saw but the whole point of these awards is not to recognise the films that made the most money, it’s to recognise artistic merit.

The two are not mutually exclusive but when you’re a smaller film without the marketing budget of a Marvel movie, awards is one of the avenues to drum up interest. Not for nothing, Anora, The Brutalist and Flow are all profitable.

The Brutalist has also taken about $66 million while Flow has done about $27.3 million. It’s nothing compared to Avatar: The Way of Water’s $3.6 billion but James Cameron said his movie needed to clear the $3.2 billion mark just to break even.

The film with the most nominations this year, Emilia Perez, didn’t count as an independent film after it was acquired by Netflix out of its Cannes Film Festival premiere, but its roots were less big Hollywood studio.

It was made for $41.8 million, financed mostly from French companies, and outside of the US and UK, distributed by smaller outfits and only in cinemas. In Australia, Kismet bought the rights before Cannes.

Last year, when writer Cord Jefferson won the Oscar for adapted screenplay for American Fiction, he called out the industry for shrinking opportunities for low to mid-budget filmmakers.

“I understand this is a risk-averse industry, I get it. But $200 million movies are also a risk, and it doesn’t always work out. Instead of making one $200 million movie, try making 20 $10 million movies or 50 $4 million movies,” he said.

Audiences often complain there are no original movies anymore because all they hear about are sequels, reboots and franchise entries. They would rather stay home and binge something forgettable on streaming.

But if you pay attention, yes, to the Oscars as well as other awards, you might discover there is a lot of innovative, bold and fresh filmmaking still happening – and absolutely worth going to the cinema for.

Baker, in accepting his director Oscar, made a plea for the theatrical experience.

“Watching a film in the theatre with an audience is an experience. We can scream and fight together, cry together, perhaps sit in silence together, and in a time in which the world can feel very divided, this is more important than ever, a communal experience you simply don’t get at home.”

He spoke directly to filmmakers to keep making films for the big screen, to distributors to prioritise a cinema release and to parents to take their kids to the theatre, to inspire the next generation of storytellers.

“This is my battle cry,” Baker said.

The cinema-versus-streaming narrative is taking hold. In an interview earlier in the season, Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote, directed and starred in A Real Pain, for which he was nominated for a screenplay Oscar, said that while he remained relatively ambivalent about the platform (he said he didn’t consider it his job to decide), he said his producers Emma Stone (yes, that Emma Stone) and Dave McCrary were adamant films had to go to the cinema first.

There was also the case recently where British writer and director Emerald Fennell and producer and actor Margot Robbie turned down a reported $241 million from Netflix for half that money to ink a deal with Warner Bros which would guarantee their Wuthering Heights adaptation would get a wide theatrical release.

Obviously, Baker and Corbet are not playing with those kinds of budgets, and they might not even want to if it came with the strings studios tend to attach.

As much as this year’s Oscars are a triumph for indie filmmakers, catapulting their profile and their works on a global scale, it’s not all sunshine and roses. The people who work in this space really scrimp, scrap and work to get it done.

Corbet has previously said that he and partner Mona Fastvold made no money out of The Brutalist or his other two films and sustain themselves off commercial projects such as directing ads.

Baker has said that he and his partner Samantha Quan are only able to pursue their art because they don’t have the financial responsibility of looking after children.

Last weekend at the Independent Spirit Awards, Baker was frank about the pressure the indie industry is under.

“Indie film is struggling now more than ever. Gone are the days of DVD sales that allowed for a greater risk to be taken on challenging films. That revenue stream is gone, and the only way to see significant back end is to have a box office hit with profits that far exceed what any of our films will ever see.”

Baker calls himself an indie-lifer who isn’t making movies as a “calling card” to get hired by a big studio.

“Some of us want to make personal films that are intended for theatrical release with subject matters that would never be greenlit by the big studios.

“We want complete artistic freedom and the freedom to cast who is right for the role, not who we’re forced to cast considering box office value, or how many followers they have on social media. The system has to change because this is simply unsustainable.”

He argued that indie filmmakers should be getting much higher upfront fees in deals with agencies, financiers, sales companies and distributors, or the industry will die.

If that happens, what will we be left with? Avatar 17 and Fast & Furious 35, probably direct to streaming.

Anora and The Brutalist are in cinemas, Flow is in cinemas on March 20