A huge year for indie filmmakers: in the press room with this year's Academy Award winners
Photo Collage by Izzy Betz, Features/Entertainment Editor
From an awards sweep for NEON and Sean Baker’s “Anora,” to a three-and-a-half-hour post-World War II epic, to a silent animated cat movie not made by a major animation studio, the 97th Academy Awards was a night full of historic wins for indie filmmaking.
The Panther had the opportunity to be in the press room for the awards show, catching the winners of each category just after they walked off the stage with their golden trophies. The Panther also asked a question to Lol Crawley, the cinematographer of the indie post-WWII film “The Brutalist,” after receiving his award.
Gints Zilbalodis, Matīss Kaža, Gregory Zalcman and Ron Dyens pose backstage with the Oscar® for Animated Feature Film during the live ABC Telecast of the 97th Oscars® at Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 2, 2025. Photo credit Richard Harbaugh ©A.M.P.A.S.
The first group to make their way to the press room was the team behind the animated cat movie “Flow,” the winner of Best Animated Feature Film: Gints Zilbalodis, Matīss Kaža, Ron Dyens and Gregory Zalcman.
“Flow” is the first Latvian film to win the Best Animated Feature Film award, and it was made with an animation platform that anyone can access.
“Blender is a free open-source software, which means everyone can have access to it,” said writer and director Zilbalodis. “Any kid now has the tools that are used to make these now Academy-winning films. I think we’re going to see all kinds of exciting films being made from kids who might not have had a chance to do this before. It’s not in any way a compromise, it’s just as good as anything out there, and we’re going to use it also for my next film.”
Zilbalodis was also asked about the choice not to use any dialogue in the movie.
“I think you can express a lot more without words. There are some of these emotions and ideas that I couldn’t articulate with words,” said Zilbalodis. “But with music and sound and movement and editing, I think I can say a lot more. Those are my favorite kinds of films and favorite scenes, which I think are very cinematic and can transcend cultural boundaries. I think it’s kind of a universal language that we can all understand. Cinema is a language, and so we wanted to push it as far as we could.”
Paul Tazewell poses backstage with the Oscar® for Costume Design during the live ABC Telecast of the 97th Oscars® at Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 2, 2025. Photo credit Richard Harbaugh ©A.M.P.A.S.
This show held many historic and groundbreaking moments, including Paul Tazewell’s win for Costume Design in “Wicked.” He is the first Black man to receive the Oscar for Best Costume Design.
Peter Straughan poses backstage with the Oscar® for Adapted Screenplay during the live ABC Telecast of the 97th Oscars® at Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 2, 2025. Photo credit Richard Harbaugh ©A.M.P.A.S.
“This is the pinnacle of my career,” said Tazewell. “I’ve been designing costumes for over 35 years, and the whole way through, there was never a Black male designer that I saw that I could follow, that I could use as inspiration. And to realize that that’s actually me, it becomes a ‘Wizard of Oz’ moment, you know, it’s no place like home.”
When asked what he would say to a younger version of himself, Tazewell said, “I would say hold on tight, it will all be fine and the world is going to be wonderful.”
Next up to the press stage was Peter Straughan, speaking after winning the award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Conclave.”
Entertainment Weekly asked Straughan if it feels surreal to be watching the news around Pope Francis at this moment and the possibility of facing an actual papal conclave in the near future.
“I sort of agree with Robert Harris (the author of the book “Conclave” of which the film is adapted) on this that it feels kind of bad taste to bring the Pope’s health into the sort of celebratory atmosphere,” said Straughan. “I would just say that we’re all wishing him well and hoping for a speedy recovery.”
The second win of the night for “Wicked” was for Nathan Crowley and Lee Sandales’ work in production design. Crowley has been nominated six other times in this category — three of them being for his work in films by Christopher Nolan. This year finally marked a win.
When asked what the importance of cinema and grand-scale entertainment is, Crowley said all he wants to do is make the audience truly believe they aren’t in their seats at a theater.
“It’s because I need to believe. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve gone to the cinema,” said Crowley. “I‘ve loved cinema. I need to fall into big-scale films, like I have to be taken away. I want to not know what’s going on in the world or anywhere around me. I need to take you away.”
Sandales believes they achieved that.
“It was like just trying to find Oz. I mean, for me when I was a kid, you see films like ‘Star Wars’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and it was always you were transported to another world,” Sandales said. “We were inspired when we were kids, what would it feel like, you know, going somewhere else?”
Lee Sandales and Nathan Crowley pose backstage with the Oscar® for Production Design during the live ABC Telecast of the 97th Oscars® at Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 2, 2025. Photo credit Richard Harbaugh ©A.M.P.A.S.
Sandales also shared some lovely words about Jon M. Chu, the director of “Wicked.”
“I would actually say what Marc Platt said about Jon, and it’s so true now, Jon basically painted the whole rainbow, and we’re actually standing here because he took all of us and the audience over the rainbow,” said Sandales.
Next up was the team behind the Best Original Song, “El Mal” from “Emilia Pérez,” Camille, Clément Ducol and Jacques Audiard. Conan O’Brien, the host of the awards show, made quite a few jokes about the controversies surrounding the film’s entire Oscars campaign. The team did not escape those same controversies in the press room.
In an era of anti-trans political attacks, Rolling Stone noted there was no mention during the award show of the trans community and if they wanted to say anything else about the subject.
“Since I didn’t win Best Film or Best Director, I didn’t have the opportunity to speak, but had I had that opportunity, I would have spoken up,” said Audiard.
He didn’t add anything else.
The team behind “The Only Girl in the Orchestra” — director and producer Molly O’Brien and producer Lisa Remington — came into the room after winning the Oscar for Documentary Short Film. They were asked if they had any advice to give to the women looking at them winning this award tonight.
Lisa Remington and Molly O'Brien at the live ABC Telecast of the 97th Oscars® at the Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 2, 2025. Photo credit Richard Harbaugh ©A.M.P.A.S.
“One of Orin O’Brien’s, the star of ‘The Only Girl in the Orchestra,’ nuggets of wisdom that we were unable to put in the film is she always says, ‘When the going gets rough, and the ride is bumpy, stay on the train. If you stay on the train long enough, the landscape changes.’ And it’s true. I can say that personally. You stay on the train long enough, the landscape changes. So stay on the train,” said O’Brien.
The Panther was able to ask cinematographer Lol Crawley a question after his win for his work on “The Brutalist.”
Lol Crawley answering interview room question from The Panther Newspaper ©A.M.P.A.S.
Walter Salles poses backstage with the Oscar® for International Feature Film during the live ABC Telecast of the 97th Oscars® at Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 2, 2025. Photo credit Richard Harbaugh ©A.M.P.A.S.
When “I’m Still Here” won Best International Feature Film, the press room cheered louder than for any other award. Director Walter Salles accepted the award for Brazil and shared more about what the film meant to him in the press room.
“This real-life story is the one where an extraordinary woman is protagonist Eunice Paiva,” Salles said. “So, I think she’s still guiding us. This isn’t really just the film. It’s Eunice protecting us and being here. And at the same time, it’s Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro, two extraordinary Brazilian actresses, showing us that to resist is important in art, and they did that. They did resist and art flourished thanks to them.”
To finish the night out, director Baker and his producing partners Samantha Quan and Alex Coco came to speak about winning Best Picture for “Anora.” Baker also took home three other awards: Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Director. He sets a record for the most Oscars won by one person for one film.
Baker was asked what it means to him that the winners of Best Picture and Best Animated Feature Film were independent films.
“We always jump into these projects knowing that we will have to compete with films that have budgets that are literally almost 100 times what we’ve shot our film for,” Baker said. “So when we’re actually able to get into the same room as other films such as ‘Wicked,’ a wonderful movie but a totally different type of film from ours, it means we’re doing something right.”
Baker continued: “It’s been a great tradition over the last few years of independent films being recognized and this batch this year is so wonderful. We feel very aligned with filmmakers of, for example, ‘The Brutalist,’ (the writer and director) Brady (Corbet) and (writer) Mona (Fastvold). We feel very aligned with the way that they are making movies and we’re very inspired by them. So for us to be, you know, just in that conversation this year with these other wonderful independents, it means everything.”
The last question of the night asked Baker what his message was to those who judge and criticize sex workers. He previously stated that he felt like all of his films thus far and the research he has done on sex workers have all led to the creation of “Anora.”
Samantha Quan, Sean Baker and Alex Coco attend the Governors Ball following the live ABC telecast of the 97th Oscars® at the Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood in Los Angeles, CA, on Sunday, March 2, 2025. Photo credit Al Seib ©A.M.P.A.S.
“I’ve been pretty outspoken about my stance on sex work. It’s our oldest profession,” Baker said, with quotation marks around “oldest.” “Yet it has an incredible, unfair stigma applied to it. What I’ve been trying to do with my films is sort of chip away at that very unfair stigma. Personally, I think it should be decriminalized. I guess through my work, through hopefully humanizing my characters that are usually seen as perhaps caricatures in most film and television, it will help to do that.”