WHERE THERE’S SMOKE

How the ‘Battle’ for Best Picture Exposes Oscars’ Biggest Sin

The industry counted “Sinners” out before it defied all box office expectations. But can it go all the way on Oscar night?

Movies that come out in April, like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, rarely gain momentum for the next 11 months until the following year’s Academy Awards.

More often, the Oscar darlings are those that premiere in the back half of the year, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, the politically prescient and star-studded epic that has seemed predestined for Best Picture despite the prolific director never having won the big one.

Even rarer is a genre film like Sinners, a vampire action musical, finding its way into the top of the awards conversation.

It’s not unheard of: Everything Everywhere All At Once did the very same thing as Sinners could be poised to do three years ago. That sci-fi action melodrama with a diverse cast not only won Best Picture, but also picked up more than half of the 11 awards it was nominated for, including all but one above-the-line honor, setting several records along the way.

The craft categories initially seemed like Sinners’ best bets with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The film’s costumes, by the incomparable Ruth E. Carter, who became the first Black person to win an Academy Award in that category for Coogler’s Black Panther, are more than deserving. There’s also Ludwig Göransson’s evocative gothic blues score that indelibly evokes 1930s Mississippi Delta.

And perhaps most striking is Göransson and Raphael Saadiq’s original song “I Lied To You,” the musical centerpiece of the film, performed by Miles Caton, that transports viewers simultaneously to the past and the future. The song beautifully communicates the message at the heart of Sinners about how white supremacy has sucked the blues from Black culture for its own gain while discarding the bodies that make it.

But Sinners has already had a much bigger impact on the Oscars race than anyone could have imagined.

Somewhere along the way, a groundswell accumulated, resulting in a record 16 Oscar nominations. The previous record, shared by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997), and La La Land (2016), was 14. That means Sinners surpassed those classic films even without the new Best Casting award, which it is predicted to win.

Despite the trade publications’ best efforts to paint Sinners as a failure out of the gate, and Coogler as the movie industry’s downfall for negotiating a deal that would revert ownership of his movie back to him in 25 years, theatergoers turned out for Sinners (and have continued to do so as the film has been released back into theaters several times since its premiere).

Concerns about Sinners recouping its $90 million budget have been put to rest by its more than $370 million global haul. By contrast, due to a budget nearly twice that of Sinners, One Battle would have to gross more than $300 million worldwide, but has barely cracked $200 million.

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Awards pundits similarly overlooked the cast of newcomers and underappreciated veterans when predicting who would make it into the acting categories.

But star Michael B. Jordan as protagonist twins Smoke and Stack, Delroy Lindo as weathered blues musician Delta Slim, and Wunmi Mosaku as Hoodoo practitioner and Smoke’s estranged wife Annie, all prevailed in garnering Oscar nominations for their roles, while picking up wins from different awards bodies along the way.

In Best Supporting Actress, the precursors have been divided up between Mosaku at the BAFTAs, One Battle After Another’s Teyana Taylor at the Golden Globes, and Amy Madigan for Weapons (another genre flick making waves in the awards conversation) at the Critics’ Choice and the Screen Actors Guild’s newly renamed Actor Awards.

Lindo has mostly been shut out as an individual performer, but managed to garner a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars, where he just might pull a Jamie Lee Curtis in Everything Everywhere and go home with the statue as both an acknowledgement of his work on Sinners and also a lifetime achievement trophy of sorts.

His biggest competition at this point is One Battle’s villainous Sean Penn, who has won the past two Best Supporting Actor awards leading up to the Oscars—the BAFTAs and Actor Awards—despite being present at neither and campaigning in unconventional ways. Unlike Lindo, he already has two Oscars on his shelf for Mystic River (2003) and Milk (2008).

Best Actor is where things could get really interesting.

The apparent frontrunner for Best Actor, Timothée Chalamet, picked up a Critics Choice Award and Musical or Comedy Golden Globe for Marty Supreme, while The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura won the respective Globe for Drama. The BAFTA went to Robert Aramayo for I Swear, a film that isn’t even eligible at the Oscars (and the subject of which, John Davidson, who has Tourette’s syndrome, shouted racial slurs at Jordan and Lindo at the awards ceremony, a controversy that dominated headlines in the weeks leading up to Oscar voting).

If the responses to star Michael B. Jordan and Sinners’ ensemble winning Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role and Outstanding Performance by a Cast, respectively, at the Actor Awards, are any indication, the tide could well be turning in their direction.

While One Battle may have been crowned as the presumed Oscar darling with a political message for our time, Sinners might just be the engine that could derail One Battle’s presumed steamrolling through many of the big categories, including Best Picture.

Given the Academy’s complicated history of denying Best Picture winners by Black filmmakers the Best Director award—see 12 Years a Slave (2013) and Moonlight (2016)—that award feels destined to land in Paul Thomas Anderson’s hands on Sunday night, Mar. 15.

Coogler, who is almost certain to win his first Oscar for writing Sinners’ original screenplay, is well-established by this point as a visionary who also makes box-office bank. But it wouldn’t hurt for the Academy to anoint him once and for all.

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Scarlett Harris

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