Pretty much every year, The Post kept the 2017 Oscar race in a kind of suspended animation while we all waited to see if it would be the One.
This year’s Oscar wild card, however, is something that’s been with us all year. Sinners premiered in mid-April, well before Cannes and the first wave of festival-approved Oscar contenders. And for the last seven months, Oscar pundits have entertained a wide swath of possibilities for its path to next March’s Oscar ceremony. Sinners is both one of the most critically celebrated movies of the year, as well as a box-office success, meaning Academy voters have likely seen it and clocked its prestige. At the same time, it’s also a deviation from the typical Oscar contender in its genre and subject matter, causing some of us to wonder if there is a ceiling on just how high Ryan Coogler’s film can climb, even if recent precedent suggests that the Oscars’ embrace of sci-fi and horror has gotten a lot more far-reaching over the last decade or so.
Making the case for Sinners as Oscar-worthy isn’t hard. For one thing, it had a massive audience — at $297 million domestic, it’s the fifth-highest-grossing movie of the year — and pretty much everybody who saw it loved it. Critics praised it to the tune of an 84 Metacritic score (“universal acclaim”), while Cinemascore polled audiences exiting the movie and gave the film an “A” grade. “Universal acclaim” is a really good place to start! Add to that the fact that director Ryan Coogler is perfectly positioned for an Oscar breakout narrative. Between Creed and both Black Panther movies, his films have amassed 14 nominations and four wins over the last decade, and yet Coogler himself has never been nominated for Best Director. That alchemy — of Coogler being inside the Academy gates but still overdue for individual recognition — can be ripe for an “It’s his time” campaign.
That’s all the good news. The concern comes when you simply state the obvious: Sinners is a vampire movie. It’s a vampire movie about a lot of very worthy subjects: racial injustice in the Jim Crow South, Black entrepreneurship on the fringes of “polite” society, music and dance and sex as a means of ecstatic release, the predation of white capitalism on Black art. But a vampire movie it remains. That doesn’t disqualify Sinners from contention, but it could potentially keep certain snobbier or more timid voters away. The Academy’s aversion to the horror genre is a recurring tale with notable exceptions (The Silence of the Lambs, Carrie, The Exorcist) but far more examples of acclaimed movies that were ignored by the Academy (The Shining, The Thing, Toni Collette and Florence Pugh in Hereditary and Midsommar, respectively).
There’s also the fact that Michael B. Jordan has been continually passed over by Oscar voters even when his candidacy has made great sense on paper: The 2013 Sundance hit Fruitvale Station saw its buzz fizzle out by the end of the year; his powerhouse lead turn in Creed and electric supporting villainy in Black Panther were conspicuously left out of those films’ Oscar nomination tallies. Recent ventures into more classic Oscar genres like the inspirational courtroom drama Just Mercy and the military drama A Journal for Jordan were nonstarters in awards season. With Sinners, Jordan makes his best case ever for Oscar consideration, playing twins Smoke and Stack Moore in a pair of performances defined by small differences in personality and desires. As with Coogler, there’s the potential for Jordan to grasp onto a narrative that he’s overdue, but there remains the frustrating possibility that Oscar voters just don’t appreciate him enough.
Other potential negatives feel more trivial: There’s always the worry that movies that open earlier in the year will have peaked too early and won’t fare as well as newer, buzzier movies, but that’s only sometimes true. There’s also the matter of the deal Ryan Coogler struck with Warner Bros. that the rights to Sinners would revert to him after 25 years. Back when the film was released and first became a hit, there was One Battle After Another, will the studio folks line up to support the movie they’ll be making money off of for longer?
Of course, the big reason to be optimistic about Sinners’s Oscar chances is that the current version of the Academy is not what it used to be. A concerted effort to increase the diversity of the Academy has also made the votership younger, more international, and seemingly more adventurous. Every year there’s another nominated movie that pushes against the boundaries of what an “Oscar movie” could be, whether it’s hyper-commercial IP like Barbie, body horror like The Substance, or the human-fish romance of The Shape of Water. We’ve never seen an Oscar winner like Sinners before, but we’d also never seen an Oscar winner like Parasite before.
Two particular movies that won big at the Oscars in the last ten years stand out as possible templates for a substantive Sinners run: Mad Max: Fury Road and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Neither one of them fit into any standard definition of an “Oscar movie,” but that didn’t stop them from racking up Oscar wins: six for Fury Road and seven (including Best Picture) for EEAAO. The Fury Road comparisons to Sinners line up quite well: Both films were more gleefully violent than typical Oscar fare, and both were celebrated by critics and cinephiles for being auteurist triumphs in an environment that’s increasingly resistant to it. Critics got onboard with Fury Road early, with the National Board of Review designating it Best Film and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association giving George Miller Best Director. And while I fully expect this year’s critics awards to heap laurels upon Paul Thomas Anderson and One Battle After Another, if one of the big three critics organizations (NBR, LAFCA, and New York Film Critics Circle) opts for Sinners, that would be significant.
Like Hamnet taking the big awards.
But one big difference between Fury Road and Sinners is that while Fury Road was never really in the game when it came to the acting categories, Sinners is stacked with acting contenders. Besides Michael B. Jordan in Best Actor, you could make a case for any of the film’s supporting actors (Delroy Lindo, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell) or supporting actresses (particularly Wunmi Mosaku and Hailee Steinfeld). The cast may end up being the strongest card Sinners has to play. As my colleague Nate Jones goofing around at campaign events and on red carpets.
Sinners is already off to a strong campaigning start with pieces like this one in Elle, which gathers Mosaku, Steinfels, and Jayme Lawson together to talk about their experiences making the film. We’ll also get to see how well Sinners does the big, happy family thing at next month’s Gotham Awards when the cast accepts that organization’s Ensemble Tribute Award. In addition to Jordan, Lindo, Caton, O’Connell, Mosaku, Steinfeld, and Lawson, that award also includes Omar Benson Miller, Li Jun Li, and Buddy Guy.
This potential to compete for acting nominations puts Sinners on another trajectory: the Everything Everywhere All at Once path. That movie, like Sinners, opened in the first third of the year, dominated discourse, and left people wondering whether Oscar voters would really go for something that extreme. They obviously did, to the tune of a near-sweep of the major categories. But it wasn’t until the precursor awards started rolling in, with Ke Huy Quan collecting Best Supporting Actor honors everywhere and Stephanie Hsu joining Jamie Lee Curtis on Best Supporting Actress ballots, that we realized just how much voters were dialed into that movie’s odd wavelength.
The Everything Everywhere win-’em-all path is obviously the best-case scenario for a Sinners outcome and won’t come to fruition easily. The competition this year is much stronger, for one thing. All Quiet on the Western Front can’t hold a candle to One Battle After Another’s Paul Thomas Anderson angle, and to say that Tár doesn’t have the emotional appeal of a Hamnet is beyond understatement. That path also requires, at some point, the votes coalescing around certain standout members of the cast. Ensemble awards are great — and will put Sinners in the driver’s seat for the brand new Best Casting award this year — but they don’t allow for someone like Delroy Lindo to stand out from the crowd. Will the presence of Wunmi Mosaku and Hailee Steinfeld in the Supporting Actress conversation elevate them both or dilute their support among the voters? Precedent says that the Oscars are not shy about nominating pairs of co-stars together — it’s happened in six of the last eight years in fact. But when it comes to Sinners, a movie unlike any Oscar contender that has come before it, nothing is guaranteed.
Best Picture
Up ⬆ Sinners
As my colleague Nate Jones noted earlier this year, we’re at the point in the conversation when the question is: “If Coogler is indeed the next Nolan, is Sinners his Inception, which got into Picture and Screenplay and won a few craft trophies? Is it his Dunkirk, which earned the filmmaker his long-awaited directing nod? Or is it his Oppenheimer, the box-office juggernaut that simply becomes undeniable?” After all this Sinners talk, I’m excited for the latter. The sky’s the limit!
Down ⬇ Nuremberg
I’d been holding out hope that a movie about the trials of Nazi officials at Nuremberg — holding the fascists accountable for their crimes against society — might catch on during Times Like These, but the meager box-office returns and middling reviews tell me otherwise.
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Current Predix
Frankenstein, Hamnet, Is This Thing On?, It Was Just an Accident, Jay Kelly, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value, Sinners, Train Dreams
Best Director
Up ⬆ Ryan Coogler, Sinners
He’d be the first Black winner of a Best Director Oscar ever, and I was going to say that he’d also be the first Sacramento State alum to win an Academy Award, but it turns out Tom Hanks also went there.
Down ⬇ Lynne Ramsay, Die My Love
After all that discussion above about how Academy tastes aren’t what they used to be, I still wonder whether Lynne Ramsay’s blistering cinematic style will ever be Oscar’s cup of tea.
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Current Predix
Chloé Zhao, Hamnet; Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident; Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme; Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another; Ryan Coogler, Sinners
Best Actor
Up ⬆ Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent
Every year there’s that movie where you keep seeing the same still splashed all over media sites and social feeds. You’ve seen the one for The Secret Agent — Wagner Moura at the gas station, shirt unbuttoned as low as a polo can possibly go, sex and antifascism in his eyes. This is good Oscar strategy on Neon’s part.
Down ⬇ Jesse Plemons, Bugonia
The pre-festival buzz on Jesse Plemons’s performance in Bugonia was strong, and he’s great in the movie. But ever since Focus decided to make head-shaving a key component of the film’s campaign, Emma Stone has been the sole focal point. Plemons needs a surprise Golden Globe nomination like you wouldn’t believe.
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Current Predix
Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme; Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another; Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon; Michael B. Jordan, Sinners; Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent
Best Actress
Up ⬆ Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue
I keep hearing that Kate Hudson is great in Craig Brewer’s upcoming movie Song Sung Blue about a husband-and-wife Neil Diamond tribute act (also starring Hugh Jackman). Don’t get my hopes up if it’s not true, whisper network!
Down ⬇ Sydney Sweeney, Christy
It’s bad enough that the film bombed at the box office, but now the fact of it bombing at the box office has become a story itself. It’ll be tough for Sweeney’s long-shot award chances to rebound from that, which is too bad, because I really thought the film played so well theatrically in its debut at the Toronto Film Festival.
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Current Predix
Jessie Buckley, Hamnet; Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You; Cynthia Erivo, Wicked: For Good; Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value; Amanda Seyfried, The Testament of Ann Lee
Best Supporting Actor
Up ⬆ Bradley Cooper, Is This Thing On?
For the first time as a director, Bradley Cooper did not give himself the lead role in his own film. This time he’s just a supporting actor who gets all the film’s funniest lines. He’s so much fun — we should reward Bradley Cooper for having this much fun.
Up ⬆ Billy Crudup, Jay Kelly
While the iron of The Morning Show is still hot, I must remind everyone that Billy Crudup gives the best performance in Jay Kelly and ought to be recognized for that.
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Current Predix
Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another; Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein; Paul Mescal, Hamnet; Sean Penn, One Battle After Another; Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value
Best Supporting Actress
Up ⬆ Amy Madigan, Weapons
Put Weapons in the same conversation as Sinners when it comes to moves that the Academy might not be too snooty for anymore. This is good news for the great veteran actress Amy Madigan, who no doubt also benefits from being one of very few Supporting Actress contenders who isn’t facing internal competition from her own movie.
Down ⬇ Glenn Close, Wake Up, Dead Man
If Glenn Close doesn’t get an Oscar push for Wake Up, Dead Man — a movie that explicitly grapples with the rise of fascist demagogues like Trump and J.D. Vance — after getting pushed so aggressively toward a nomination for Hillbilly Elegy? I will make note of that!
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Current Predix
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value; Amy Madigan, Weapons; Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners; Ariana Grande, Wicked: For Good; Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another
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