What Anora’s Oscar Win Tells Us About Hollywood’s View of God
Watching The Oscars is a good way to understand Hollywood. Hollywood makes movies to make money. But at The Oscars, Hollywood awards the films it values, or at least the ones it wants people to believe it does. Therefore, watching what gets nominated—and more significantly, what wins—can provide a good picture of what Hollywood believes.
As a Christian, I’m always interested in what The Oscars reveal about Hollywood’s perspective on God. Hollywood has a reputation for its somewhat negative view of religion. But after watching The Oscars year after year and making note of how the awards show treats faith, I’ve noticed some interesting nuances.
This year was no exception. As I’ve written elsewhere, the 2025 Academy Awards told a clear story about how Hollywood sees the world today: a giant battle between the oppressed and the oppressors. In Wicked, it is Elphaba and the animals against the ruling Wizard of Oz. In The Brutalist, the hero is an oppressed immigrant, and the villain is an exploitive businessman. Emelia Pérez pits an intolerant and corrupt society against a transgender former mob boss.
What’s even more interesting than what was nominated is what won. Conclave and Dune: Part Two were the most religion-heavy films, but they were largely snubbed. Meanwhile, Anora swept the awards. That says a lot.
Conclave offers the most optimistic version of religion in the movies nominated this year. It depicts Catholic reformers fighting to make the church more inclusive toward the marginalized, including women, sexual minorities, and immigrants. The film ends on a hopeful note that the efforts of liberal Catholics will be successful.
Dune: Part Two offers a much more pessimistic view of religion. Faith is recognized as a powerful but corrupting force. The Bene Gesserit is a group of witches who pass down the religion of the ruling houses to the marginalized people of Arrakis, including the hope for a savior who will lead them to conquer their oppressors. Yet the Bene Gesserit’s motivation is to manipulate people. Paul Atreides’ mother Jessica—a Bene Gesserit—tries to convince the Arrakis people that Paul is that promised Messiah. Paul initially resists due to visions of a genocide. But to save the woman he loves, he ultimately concedes, which leads him to become the tyrant he feared. In Dune: Part Two, the religious are the earliest and most susceptible to being taken in by lies.
Anora won Best Picture. It contains very little religion, but what it includes is instructive. The film follows a likable sex worker who marries the son of a Russian billionaire. Ultimately, the wealthy family strong-arms the couple into divorcing due to their prejudice against Anora’s line of work. The film fully sympathizes with Anora, insisting that there is nothing wrong with sex work, only with the family’s prejudice against it.
Faith comes into the film in just one scene. The family calls on an enforcer to fix the problem. The enforcer is in church participating in his godchild’s baptism when he receives the call. His abrupt departure causes a commotion among the other congregants. It’s a comedic moment that highlights the film’s take on religion as something that can be dropped at any minute to kowtow to the whims of the wealthy and powerful.
This depiction of religion is noteworthy for both its brevity and its ruthlessness. Religion shows up in one brief scene and is then quickly pushed aside. In Anora, religion doesn’t matter; the powerful ruling class who enforces their prejudice does. Religion is just one form oppression can take.
While Conclave portrays religion as a hopeful force for change, Anora expects no help from the faithful. While Dune: Part Two sets religion up as deeply important (even dangerous), Anora depicts it as largely irrelevant, a slave to power rather than a force behind it.
More importantly, while both Conclave and Dune: Part Two portray the powerful who wield religion as important, Anora does not. Anora prioritizes the story of the marginalized sex worker; the powerful—religious or not—are meaningful only insofar as they impact her story.
It makes sense that Hollywood would see faith that way. Religion in America is increasingly polarized along political lines. Liberals are abandoning faith in record numbers, while conservatives continue to embrace it. In fact, religion sociologist Ryan Burge finds few to no examples of religion in America making people more liberal, only more conservative. Hollywood is a liberal place, and it sees itself as being on the side of those who have been marginalized by conservative oppressors. As such, it makes sense that it would view religion as siding with the bad guys. Conclave’s depiction of liberal religious reformers is almost a quaint historical anachronism.
Hollywood favoring Anora makes even more sense when you realize who in America is most likely to share Hollywood’s political and religious orientation: single women. While Gen Z men are becoming more religious and more conservative, single women are becoming more liberal and abandoning religion at a greater rate than any other demographic. This trend is specifically true of single women. Marriage seems to cause women to swing much more to the political right.
Anora fits the world as Hollywood imagines it. To Hollywood, single women have the clearest view of the world, and the good men—as exemplified by Igor in Anora—are the ones who side with them. In both Anora and Dune: Part Two, single women are the moral conscience of the film, and married women are the villains who marginalize them (I.E., the “single female moral gaze” that has become such a common Hollywood trope.).
Yet Anora exemplifies the problematic nature of this worldview. As feminist journalist Louise Perry notes in her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (and its updated version for young readers, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century), it’s increasingly obvious that the “sex industry”—not those prejudiced against it—is the primary exploiter of sex workers. By “siding with the marginalized,” Hollywood is really siding with the exploiters. Likewise, Mikey Madison earned a Best Actress win in a role that was written, directed, and edited by a man in a film containing some of the most graphic sex and nudity ever featured in a Best Picture winner.
As film and culture critic Cap Stewart writes, “As more accolades, nominations, and awards are handed out to women who sexualize themselves for the camera, it reinforces industry-wide hypersexualized norms that MeToo was supposed to help dismantle. If Thompson and Stone and Madison are lauded for disrobing and sexually acting out, it sends a clear message to the tens of thousands (at least) of other actresses in the Screen Actors Guild: ‘If you want to be acknowledged for your acting chops, your clothes and inhibitions need to go on the chopping block. These are the kinds of performances we regard, respect, and reward.’”
Hollywood’s view of religion is naïve. Because it sees opposing the exploitation of women as oppressive, it can’t recognize that religious people are standing on the side of the marginalized right under their noses. And because Hollywood sees religion as largely irrelevant—a mere mask for power that can be discarded at will—it misses how God truly is a motivating force for opposition to their values.
It’s often said that when we lose our connection to God, we lose our connection to each other. With Hollywood losing its connection to God, it seems it is also losing its ability to understand the people with whom it shares a nation. And if our storytellers lose their connection to their audience, it doesn’t bode well for the future of our stories.
