Sean Baker Makes Oscar History, Achieving a Feat Coppola, Cuarón and Walt Disney Never Could
So many of the greats had come close.
Francis Ford Coppola had a good shot at doing it.
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Alfonso Cuarón and Chloé Zhao got halfway to doing it.
Walt Disney needed a whole bunch of movies to do it.
Bong Joon Ho nearly did it.
But until Sunday, no filmmaker had done it — it: won four Academy Awards for the same movie.
That’s exactly what Sean Baker pulled off when he landed Oscars for producing, directing, writing and editing the original film Anora on Sunday.
How is it that this had never happened in the 96 previous Academy Awards ceremonies, with all the greats that had come before? Well, Walt Disney won four Oscars in 1954 — for four different films.
Cuarón and Zhao landed four nominations each in 2019 and 2021, respectively, for their films Roma and Nomadland…but won only two apiece.
Coppola took home three prizes in 1974 for The Godfather: Part II but failed to capitalize on his two additional nominations for The Conversation. Composer Alan Menken also won three Oscars for Beauty and the Beast in 1993 but came up short on the other two.
The closest we got before Sunday was when Bong took the stage four times for Parasite in 2020, but the fourth was an international prize that goes to the country.
Baker won four Oscars, for four jobs, on the same movie.
“It’s surreal; a lot of those are my heroes,” Baker told The Hollywood Reporter when informed in January that he was joining a rare group that had even been nominated four times in the same year.
On Sunday things got even more freaky as the 54-year-old’s name was called again and again.
In fact, it seemed like Baker might run out of people (creatures) to thank when, after win No. 2, he left the stage by shouting out to his dog, Bunsen. But he rebounded for Oscars No. 3 and No. 4, first making a plea for theatrical film as a unifying force for the former and saluting independent film with the latter. (Also, the other producers could talk for that last one.)
Part of the honor is attributable to the Academy’s recent willingness to fete independent filmmakers, who are more likely to wear many hats on a project; indeed, Emilia Pérez director Jacques Audiard was nominated four times this year, too.
But part of it is simply due to Baker’s extreme hustle, for his practicing a kind of DIY filmmaking that results in all that recognition. If modern Hollywood is filmmaking by (large) committee, Baker’s style is my-small-team-and-I-will-get-it-done — a style he practiced on his past diverse-but-all-handmade work such as The Florida Project, Tangerine and Starlet.
“I want to thank the Academy for recognizing a truly independent film,” Baker said upon receiving that fourth Oscar. “This film was made on the blood, sweat and tears of incredible indie artists.” On Sunday, it was all converted into bronze and gold.
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