The awards ceremony can’t escape Harvey Weinstein and a two fairytales come a cropper

• Anora dominates the Oscars — here’s the complete list of winners

While the dominance of last year’s Oppenheimer showed that big films will forever have their place at the Oscars, the Academy has increasingly gravitated to the smaller movie. Back in 2017, Moonlight became the best picture winner with the smallest ever budget (about $1.5m) and since then, films like Coda ($10m), Parasite ($11m) and Nomadland ($5m) have continued to bring indie films back to the main stage. This year, blockbusters like Wicked and Dune: Part Two might have scored major nominations but they had to settle for below-the-line wins, typically where bigger budget films have now tended to remain. The films that won above the line such as Anora ($6m), The Brutalist ($10m) and A Real Pain ($3m) relied on campaigns that stressed the importance of making a lot from a little and it meant that the night was ultimately another success story for independent film-making.

Sean Baker’s film is muddled, hollow at the middle and about the fifth least vital of the best picture lineup

• How Anora swept the Oscars – and the complete list of winners
• The red carpet and Oscars ceremony – in pictures

It is hard to imagine a more charming Oscar winner than Sean Baker. The director – and writer, editor and producer – of Anora was wonderfully persuasive and gracious and fluent at the Academy Awards. He was funny picking up best editing, and then he was sweet accepting the screenwriter prize.

When it came to the directing gong, he was downright godlike: the podium his soapbox, superbly leveraged for a gang-busting call to arms about the importance of cinema and the need for people to support bricks and mortar venues.

Political metaphors were the dark undercurrent in this year’s crop of Oscars, from Anora’s toxic masculinity to the revolutionary defiance of I’m Still Here

So, as Conan O’Brien pointed out, the Oscars went to a film about someone standing up to a Russian, and maybe recent events mean we have to probe its political metaphor even further. Sean Baker’s cacophonous, crazy non-love story Anora won four Academy Awards including best actress for that rather amazing and newly born star Mikey Madison, playing the tough, smart, beautiful New York lap dancer who gets a Vegas quickie marriage to the spoilt and pusillanimous son of a Russian oligarch and then has to stand up to his parents. Madison embodies Anora’s complex courage: not exactly romantic, not exactly in love, but certainly believing in the wedding contract, in her own status as a legally married woman and in the possibility of happiness which is no more remote for her than for anyone else. She is the thoroughly modern, thoroughly 21st-century version of Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, who thinks that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty. She is in an all-against-one contest against toxic masculinity, and her final scene is rather extraordinary: reclaiming the dignity and honesty of what she is doing for a living, against the bullying and bad faith of all the men in her life.

And yes, it is about an American who is wooed by a Russian, in whom she pathetically reposes her trust but who ultimately betrays her. Teasing out who is Trump and who is Putin in this scenario isn’t easy. Maybe Anora is the American Maga voter and her pampered and impetuous bridegroom is the Russified and compromised US president, a Trumputin who makes promises but is then himself brutally brought to heel by his owner. It’s an amazing win for this exhilarating and scintillating film, and what a career arc for the American indie auteur Baker.

How Anora swept the Oscars – and the complete list of winners

The red carpet and Oscars ceremony – in pictures

The best quotes of the night

Trump cutting off USAid reminds us how much power we surrender to those who fund our work. We need a new mindset

About 35 years ago, the radio news announced that the then president of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, had broken diplomatic ties with Norway. The embassy, with about 100 foreign and a few local staff, had one week to clear out of the country.

I was one of a few staff there at the time who worked for the Norwegian development agency, Norad, and our jobs disappeared with that radio broadcast. An estimated $30m annual budget, largely targeted at the arid and semi-arid parts of Kenya, also disappeared. Obviously that did not matter much to Kenya’s leadership, who felt that the independence of the country and the ability for them to decide what was good for Kenya, was more important.

Trump cutting off USAid reminds us how much power we surrender to those who fund our work. We need a new mindset

About 35 years ago, the radio news announced that the then president of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, had broken diplomatic ties with Norway. The embassy, with about 100 foreign and a few local staff, had one week to clear out of the country.

I was one of a few staff there at the time who worked for the Norwegian development agency, Norad, and our jobs disappeared with that radio broadcast. An estimated $30m annual budget, largely targeted at the arid and semi-arid parts of Kenya, also disappeared. Obviously that did not matter much to Kenya’s leadership, who felt that the independence of the country and the ability for them to decide what was good for Kenya, was more important.

Peter Blake, Jim Moir and more celebrate the late artist’s genius. Plus: Norma Percy’s masterly series on Israel and Palestine continues. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, BBC Four
The overlooked sole female co-founder of Britain’s pop art movement, Pauline Boty, who died at 28 in 1966, finally gets her story told in a documentary. Fans including the pop artist Peter Blake, the comedian Jim Moir (AKA Vic Reeves), the critic and curator Kate Bryan and the print designer (and Boty’s best friend) Natalie Gibson help to honour Boty’s legacy, alongside a showcase of her vibrant, feminist and politically incisive pieces, which were ahead of their time. Hollie Richardson