The 2025 Academy Awards could not have gone better. After winning the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the wild romance Anora cleaned up at the Oscars, with Sean Baker winning four times – for best picture, director, original screenplay and editing.

‘Before I was really immersed in global cinema I was ready to make the next Die Hard, the next Robocop’: Sean Baker. Vivid Sydney

Only Walt Disney had done that before at a single Oscars, for producing four different films. Baker did it with one: a wild contemporary tale shot for just $US6 million, for which little-known Mikey Madison won best actress for playing a New York lap dancer swept into a freewheeling romance with a young Russian.

On stage at the Oscars he talked about three of his passions: the vital importance of films screening in cinemas, respect for the sex worker community, and why independent filmmaking – outside the commercial imperatives of Hollywood studios – matters.

Baker, a youthful-looking 55-year-old, works with distributors who…