Anora - yet another tedious Oscar winning movie ....

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So my movie package had Anora loaded in on the list and as always I feel obliged to watch the big oscar movies. I know this is a very bad idea but I always fall for it. Normally certain types of movies target the Oscars with a cinema release just before the cut off point around Christmas and late January and designed to get the critics raving about them and keeping bad word of mouth from punters spreading too far. Well Anora stank the place up ,a really average film packed with cliche characters and overacting. Incredibly it won Best Picture. Mikey Madison won Best Actress as the typical Brooklyn mouthy female sex worker you see in many an East Coast movie and really irritates early the way Julia Roberts did in Pretty Woman and you quickly reach for the fast-forward in search of something actually happening here. Hookers do not look like Julia Roberts. Their faces are generally scared from drug use, beatings from all sorts of people and the life in general. Its a love story of sorts when Ani(Madison) falls for nepo baby Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the spoilt son of a Russian Oligarch, who lives in a huge modern mansion in the Russian expat area of Brooklyn and does what he likes, which includes, drugs, parties, girls and generally annoying his handlers, but not going to university to complete his degree. He meets Ani at a club and pays for her 'services' overtime but gets on with her enough to eventually ask her to marry him as part of that deal so he doesn't have to go back to Russia and work with his parents, if he can get a US marriage visa. Well they get married in Vegas behind his families back and the parents not happy. The rest of the movie is even more annoying as Ani overacts some more trying not to annul the marriage and so claim to family wealth etc.. It's just so limited. Both characters are obnoxious and not likeable and that quickly makes you tire of the movie. You cant have that in a love story. The peripheral characters are boring and the plot does not build to anything interesting. I just cant recommend it and amazed it got all the big award ceremony support, two hours of tedium. It only did $38 million in the US, pretty dire for an Oscar winner but on a six million budget. The Brutalist, which I have seen , is a much better movie and much better acting and should have won Best picture and Best director.