Bill Maher returned to the topic of the Best Picture Oscar winner Anora on Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
Last week, Maher posited that Sean Baker‘s indie hit winning the big prize on Oscar night was helped by the Karla Sofía Gascón controversies that tainted her leading Oscar nominee Emilia Pérez.
This week on his HBO show, Maher held up Anora in a “New Rules” segment about “whores having a moment,” questioning when the term “sex worker community” became the norm, playing clips of both Mikey Madison and Baker thanking the group during their Oscar acceptance speeches.
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Comparing the phrase to when the term “homeless” became “unhoused” and “illegal alien” became “undocumented migrant,” Maher said argued that the repositioning can be looked at as a detriment.
“You can get so caught up in the virtue signaling that you actually do harm to the cause, and using ‘sex worker’ makes it sound too benign, like it’s a temp job at a call center being done by a woman in a cubicle with a cactus on her desk,” he said. “But it’s not that, and it’s not usually the woman’s choice to do it. The language may have changed, but the job hasn’t.”
Maher did call Anora a “great movie” and “so is Baker’s other movie about a sex worker, Tangerine, and his other movie about a sex worker, Red Rocket, and his other movie about a sex worker, Starlet, and his other movie about a sex worker, The Florida Project.
“Look, I think Sean is a huge talent,” Maher jabbed playfully, “but he does think about whores a lot.”
Watch the clip above.
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