Last fall, Sean Baker was sitting in a Manhattan restaurant, talking about a poll. The survey, about sex in movies and television, showed that Gen Z moviegoers were mostly turned off by sex in film.

"That broke my heart. I thought, there's something wrong here," said Baker. "You're OK with all the violence that's out there? Sex is a vital part of existence. Why don't you want to see sex in our stories?"

"I remember being on set and being like: We're pushing against that poll."

When Baker's "Anora" swept the 97th Academy Awards on Sunday, its five wins, including best picture, heralded a different kind of Oscar winner. "Anora," about an erotic dancer (Mikey Madison, the best actress winner ) who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, is atypically sexually explicit for a best picture winner — a class that includes more staid movies like "The King's Speech" and "Driving Miss Daisy." A young woman's relationship to her own sexuality has not been, historically speaking, in the Oscars' wheelhouse.

But that's just one quality that makes "Anora" unique as a best picture winner. The film, made for $6 million and distributed by Neon, was made with little interest in the mainstream. If anything, "Anora" was more oriented to the Cannes Film Festival, the French citadel of cinema, where it won the Palme d'Or last May — a prize that Baker said meant the most to him.

But, increasingly, these are converging movie worlds. In the last five years, four Palme d'Or winners have been nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards, including Bong Joon Ho's "Parasite" (also distributed by Neon), which became the first non-English language movie to win Hollywood's top prize.

"Anora," a film that inverts a Hollywood fairy tale like "Pretty... Read More