If ‘Sinners’ Wins Best Picture, What Will Its Oscar Mean?

When Sinners was released last April, its success could be measured in more than colossal box-office returns. It was discussed, memed, and argued over with obsessive zeal as audiences rewatched it in theaters and debated its genre allusions, religious symbolism, and supposed culture-war positions. Impressively, the film stayed at the forefront of discourse throughout the summer, when it was available to watch at home, and into awards season even as new films premiered at festivals and seemed to overshadow Sinners’s prestige. Ryan Coogler’s American horror film, it was decided, was the Hollywood triumph story of the year.

But once Sinners became the most-nominated movie in Academy Awards history, conversations about the film reached a fevered crescendo within Black audiences. Discussions, on social media and among film critics, moved from obsessively parsing the story and its blockbuster appeal to debating what the movie means for Black film and Blackness writ large. As more awards rolled in — including Original Screenplay at the BAFTAs and a Lead Actor upset by Michael B. Jordan at the SAG awards — Sinners became a lightning rod illuminating a belief held by Black audiences throughout the medium’s history: that supporting Black film is a civic duty. Its awards success was starting to be positioned as retribution after questionable coverage of its initial victories from the likes of Variety and other white power structures that have a reputation for devaluing Blackness. Sinners’s potential Oscar wins now signal the gravity of Black progress, within and beyond the industry; its potential Oscar losses carry a glint of cruelty.

But this thinking involves a strange exaltation of the very white power structures that have always threatened or co-opted Black artistry. Speaking of the BAFTAs, that institution had to apologize this year for allowing the N-word, shouted by Tourette-syndrome activist John Davidson, to make it to broadcast on the BBC. Sinners actors Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting an award at the ceremony when Davidson’s tic occurred, and as Lindo explained to Vanity Fair, they “did what they had to do” but wished “someone from BAFTA spoke to us afterward,” referring to the fact that no one from the British Academy apologized to them personally that night. It was hard not to recognize the moment as another example of the white Establishment delighting in siphoning the popularity of Black art but doing nothing to consider and support Black artists.

The Oscars themselves were created in 1927 by MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer to pacify Tinseltown’s growing desire to support the labor of artists. As studios gulped down profits, talent below and above the line began to demand adequate shares of the pie. So the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was born as a mechanism to numb their ambitions and sow division among the labor force in Hollywood. “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them,” Mayer said. “If I got them cups and awards, they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted.” The ceremony has remained a smug political distraction ever since. In 1990, when an L.A. Times editorial questioned the Academy’s snubbing of Do the Right Thing, then-president Karl Malden wrote a letter to the editor: “The members of this academy have done more to combat racial hatred and racial misunderstanding than all the editorial writers in all the newspapers in the world.”

Black people have been protesting that distraction and the films it festoons since its early days. When Gone With the Wind sanitized the Confederacy, Black audiences picketed theaters, wrote essays and opinion pieces in Black publications, and called attention to the abhorrent treatment of Hattie McDaniel, who was segregated at the 1940 ceremony even though she won Best Supporting Actress. The Oscars were seen by Black audiences as frivolous, behind the times, and empty in the decades after, through 1996, when Reverend Jesse Jackson called for a protest of the Academy Awards, citing systemic racism at the institution’s core. He framed the lack of Black parity among nominations at the Oscars (that year only one of the 166 nominees was Black) as an urgent national disgrace. “Hollywood must do a better job in reflecting the cultural diversity of society,” Jackson explained. “Until then, every Oscar night is a celebration in excluding people of color from fair share, equal opportunity and access, a slap in the face to the American dream of a ‘one big tent’ society.”

Jackson’s efforts toward inclusion were echoed 20 years later with 2016’s Oscars So White, a hashtag campaign that pushed the Academy to announce new inclusion goals and standards, which were further affirmed in the wake of 2020’s George Floyd protests. Despite this, from 1929 to 2024, only 6 percent of all Oscar nominations went to people of color, according to USC Annenberg’s inclusion report. In the 30 years since Jackson’s protest calls, no Black director has ever won a Best Director Oscar. Halle Berry remains the only Black woman to win Best Actress. The outcome of Sunday’s race is mired with anticipatory grief for people who recall these previous cracks in the racial glass ceiling in a post-Moonlight reality in which marginalized artists and actors are not afforded the breadth of opportunity of their white peers despite their talent and accolades.

But is it surprising that a practice that began as self-satisfaction for the studio system never turned into a sustaining apparatus for Black careers in film? Likely not to the team behind Sinners, a supernatural saga about cultural identity that arrived with built-in textual critique of the ways Black art is used and abused by whiteness. As Ryan Coogler himself said, “With all respect to the Academy … my award is the opportunity to have this job.” Sinners is aggressively burdened by any other prerogative, and overanalyzing the film’s relationship to largely white awards bodies won’t change the political realities of Hollywood and the structures that support it. Truths get lost when films become cultural cachet. Perceived missteps rise to the magnitude of racial injustice. But falling into parasocial awards-season bonds with the Sinners cast and crew takes away from more fruitful conversations about the film as an artistic text or a fuller understanding of how Black film like this fits into Black life. Everyone wants to be a voice for the Black diaspora, but no one has the radical imagination to make space to sustain its cultural production.

History tells us that a Sinners Oscars haul will not end in material gains, and it was never designed to. Oscars can placate. Oscars can shore up the industry’s low esteem. But audiences are better off expanding what they believe Black cinema can be by turning their gaze away from what Hollywood believes it can be. Coogler’s groundbreaking deal to regain full rights to his movie in 25 years should serve as a guide. So much of the future is uncertain for Black filmmakers — for the medium in totality — but whether Sinners wins or loses, Coogler’s vision prevails.

This article also appears in Angelica Jade Bastién’s Madwomen and Muses Substack and Maya S. Cade’s Black Film Archive Substack. The co-authors are going live to discuss the Oscars and the state of Black filmmaking on March 13 at 2 p.m. ET.