I saw this 2025 Oscar Best Picture last week, and I’m underwhelmed. Madison is phenomenal as Ani (short for Anora), a hard-working sex worker who thinks she’s struck gold when she hooks up with a Russian oligarch’s spoiled son. He pays for blocks of her time, flies her (and friends) to Las Vegas and impulsively marries her.

She thinks she’s in love. She’s living the dream, but no one else involved believes that for a minute. For her “husband,” he’s just a pampered douche for whom this is just another one of his man-child larks, and mommy and daddy will soon put an end to this embarrassing episode.

Easier said than done!

All the oligarch’s henchmen, including a Russian Orthodox priest (!), who try to just make Ani go away underestimate her steel spine, and how fiercely she wants to believe – to continue to live – this fairy tale. One of the thugs even envies her, both because of her resolve and – mainly – because she has a chance to get out of her situation; he’ll never have that option and he knows it.

Not even a spoiler alert necessary: Money and power trump the fairy tale.

Too long – the scene where the thugs first encounter Ani is about 20 minutes long; it could easily have been 7-8. The thug who envies Ani (Yura Borisov) plays the heavy with a heart of gold in a low-key, believable manner. But I hated when Ivan (the oligarch’s son) and Ani negotiate for her to spend all week with him, it’s straight out of Pretty Woman. Why? To set up that while the Julia Roberts film may start in much the same way, the ending is going to be the total opposite?

The entire movie is really just Ani, and she nails it. But Best Picture?

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