Warner Bros. Pictures
After the year Sinners had in 2025, I awaited their reaping of awards. The Critics Choice Awards was first up and the film pulled a whopping 17 nods. It took home four, one of which included becoming the first-ever film to win the award for Best Casting. The Golden Globes followed, and the team received seven nominations. They won two, one being Best Cinematic and Box Office Achievement. The other, Best Original Score, is definitely an award to celebrate but the Golden Globes didn’t even televise this win. They chose to play the winner of Best Podcast instead.
By the end of both ceremonies, déjà vu began to creep in. This is beginning to remind me of Beyoncé’s years of being snubbed at the Grammys, I thought, losses that famously brought Jay-Z to the stage questioning how she could be the most-nominated artist of all time and still never win Album of the Year. I felt like Ryan Coogler’s Jay-Z. So, when this week Sinners’s record-breaking Oscar nominations became the top headline, doubt started to settle in: How many will it actually win?
Sinners is one of the top 10 highest-earning horror films of all time, raking in approximately $368 million worldwide and making history with a whopping 16 Oscar nominations. But as not only a horror film, but a Black original film achieving these records, the odds were always stacked against them.
In the Academy Award’s 97-year history, only one horror movie, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), has ever won Best Picture. Similarly, Black-directed films and Black filmmakers remain underrepresented in major categories. In the last decade, a handful of Black directors have been nominated for Best Director — Barry Jenkins, Jordan Peele, Ryan Coogler — but no Black director has ever won the award, a data point that’s so unbelievable it required multiple fact checks. And while a few Black-directed films, like Moonlight and 12 Years a Slave, have won Best Picture, consistent recognition in top categories remains rare compared with acting nominations or technical awards. The system’s design puts Sinners in an underdog position. But in 2026, with “times changing,” there was hope that they could pull an upset.
Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images
From the moment Sinners dominated the box office its first weekend, the industry’s way of talking about the film raised eyebrows. In an article about the movie’s massive $61 million debut, Variety wrote, “It’s a great result for an original R-rated horror film, yet the Warner Bros. release had a $90 million price tag before global marketing expenses, so profitability remains a ways away.” That article’s subsequent tweet went viral, and was textbook ratio’d, with even Ben Stiller calling out what read like a backhanded compliment: “In what universe does a $60 million opening for an original studio movie warrant this headline?”
In the last decade, a handful of Black directors have been nominated for Best Director but no Black director has ever won the award.
Later, during press runs following the film’s release, Coogler himself chimed in on how the industry continues to frame his work, through the lens of race rather than achievement. “A lot of my business success is being put in the context of me being Black,” Coogler said. “There’s an issue when people write about what my films have done. The year Black Panther came out, it was the highest-grossing film ever made by a Black person — but it was also the highest-grossing film domestically that year, made by anybody. And for some reason, it was never talked about.” The same lens of race that framed Coogler’s past successes will be unavoidable when evaluating how Sinners will be recognized (or overlooked) by the Academy come March 15.
Warner Bros. Pictures
I will remain hopeful the film gets its due, rooting for them from behind my television screen. Sinners took over my timeline and the box office for the majority of 2025. It brought superb performances from Delroy Lindo — who, after 50 years in Hollywood, has now received his first Oscar nomination ever —Jack O’Connell from Skins UK and a powerful cast of women actors, Li Jun Li, Jayme Lawson, Hailee Steinfeld, and the impressive Wunmi Mosaku. It was handcrafted by Coogler with 70mm cinematography, weaving a story about Jim Crow and fantasy in way that’s never been done before on the big screen.
But if ultimately Sinners ends the night with fewer wins than hoped for, it won’t be a failure. It will be another data point in a long-standing pattern of culture-shifting Black art being recognized loudly, while rewards remain silent and barren.
