Oscars 2025: Mikey Madison wins ‘Best Actress’
Mikey Madison has won the Oscar for ‘Best Actress’ at the 97th Academy Awards for her performance in Anora, beating fellow nominees Demi Moore for The Substance, Fernanda Torres for I’m Still Here, Cynthia Erivo for Wicked, and Karla Sofía Gascón for Emilia Pérez.
In the film, Madison plays the title character, an exotic dancer from Brooklyn who marries the young son of a Russian oligarch in a whirlwind marriage and quickly learns how low his family will stoop to get their union annulled. Madison has been neck-and-neck with Moore throughout awards season, picking up the Bafta and Independent Spirit awards for the performance but missing out on the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards.
This is Madison’s first nomination, and the role is a career breakthrough for the 25-year-old, who began working as a teenager in television series like Better Things and films like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and 2022’s Scream.
In her victory speech, Madison said: “This is very surreal—I’m going to read off a paper. I grew up in Los Angeles, but Hollywood always felt so far away… Thank you to my incredible family. Thank you to my twin brother, Miles, for being my best friend—not that you had a choice.”
Adding, “I want to recognise and honour the sex worker community. I will continue to support and be an ally. Meeting all the incredible people and women in this community has been one of the highlights of this experience… To my nominees, it is an honour to be recognised alongside all of you. Thank you so much to Sean—I adore you.”
Anora was an Oscars frontrunner, earning six nominations, including ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Editing’, ‘Best Original Screenplay’, and ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for Yura Borisov. Baker has used his acceptance speeches at various awards shows to highlight the need for independent cinema to be a more secure industry for young filmmakers.
In Far Out’s review of Anora, Emily Ruuskanen described the film as “a shattering odyssey of love in a modern world, a film that feels more urgent than his others in the way he chooses to end it, exposing a society that has been corrupted by materialism and our misogynistic dating standards. There is no dream sequence or faint optimism, just a woman who has been punished for being briefly hopeful for a fairy-tale ending, longing for stability and a human love story in a heartless world.”
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