Why Sinners Will Win Best Picture
- 23 hours ago
- 5 min read
'Tis 10 days until the Oscars, and no less than 10 films are ramping up their campaigns in a last-minute push for the top prize of them all, Best Picture!
It's been a marvelous year for movies, and this race has been a fascinating one. It's certainly not quite as wide-open as last year's felt, and in fact, early indications were that we might be headed for a runaway coronation (as we've had twice in recent years, with Oppenheimer and Everything Everywhere All At Once). But the wealth has begun to be spread a little more in recent awards shows, and two changes to this year-- a much later ceremony than usual and the requirement for all voters to screen all films before voting --both would seemingly favor the nominees with late-breaking momentum as opposed to the early ones.
What's more, I can't remember an Oscars with a more wide-open race in most of the acting categories; of the four, only one (Jesse Buckley for Best Actress) has been a constant winner, and even she doesn't feel like a guarantee, with the groundswell of support some of her fellow nominees have. Acting races can usually tip off a Best Picture race: Mikey Madison's "upset" over Demi Moore last year spelled a huge night for eventual Best Pic winner Anora. As such, with so much unknown in those categories, it's highly possible we get some chaos in the biggest of them all as well.
Those facts, as well as the Oscars' less predictable preferential voting system means that no nominee can truly be counted out of the race. Spotlight's and Moonlight's back-to-back upsets in 2016 and 2017, Parasite's stunner in 2020, and CODA's late surge in 2022 all taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 15th.
I used to do these series in alphabetical order, but over the last few years, I've liked to start with one of the biggest and most popular nominees to start things off with a bang. This year, it was a no-brainer to kick off with Sinners, the biggest story in Hollywood this year, but for a while, I thought it likely that's all Sinners would be: a big story, a wonderful accomplishment, and a delightful moment, but not a big-time Oscar winner. Things have changed in recent weeks, however. All of a sudden, I'm starting to wonder if we might not be kicking this series off with the eventual Best Picture winner.
Even if you're not a self-described cinephile, you surely heard about Sinners, the latest sensation from director Ryan Coogler and lead actor Michael B. Jordan (who had previously teamed up for the acclaimed Fruitvale Station, Black Panther and Creed). Jordan pulls double duty as twins Smoke and Stack, who return from a life of criminal activity to their hometown in "Jim Crow" Mississippi in order to open up a new juke joint. They, along with their respective romantic flames, and their wildly talented young cousin, eventually come face-to-face with the supernatural, fighting both humans and vampires for survival against a great evil.
Sound like the stuff of "biggest movie sensation of the year" to you? Well, if your answer is no, you can rest assured you weren't the only. Despite Coogler's Marvel credentials, studios and media outlets alike were pessimistic in their prognostications, with publications like Variety and The New York Times almost gleefully reporting the high box office numbers Sinners would need to attain to just break even. This coverage quickly became infamous, as the film not only attained those numbers, but smashed them, ultimately charting as one of the biggest movies of 2025; to this day, it's garnered close to $400 million.
Perhaps more significant than the sheer numbers, though, was the amount of buzz the movie got. Reviews were overwhelmingly positive, but the word-of-mouth amongst excited moviegoers was breathless in its praise. It quickly became one of those movies that everybody who had seen began telling everyone in their lives that they, too, needed to see it. I had one coworker last year who watched it more than 5 times before it even hit streaming services. It wasn't sure how much of that hype would translate to awards success, especially amongst such strong contenders, but from the Golden Globes at the turn of the New Year alllll the way through the SAG Awards last Sunday, it was a mainstay among the nominees for the main prize. It spent much of awards season as a passenger, mostly settling for Best Score, Best Makeup awards and the like. But something shifted in the last month or so: first came the record-setting 16 nominations at the Academy Award, breaking the long-held mark of 14 by Titanic. Soon after came the first win on the awards circuit for any of their actors as Delroy Lindo took home the Critics' Choice for Supporting Actor. Shortly after that, Wunmi Mosaku scored an upset in Best Supporting Actress at the BAFTAs, throwing that race into the unknown. Then, the cherry on top: last Sunday at SAG, a upset for Michael B. Jordan that placed him squarely in the race for Best Actor at the Oscars, followed by a win for Outstanding Performance by a Cast (the Best Picture equivalent) for Sinners, to an eruption of cheers among the audience. In the political world-- and what is the Oscars if not politics? --that's called Big Mo'.
Sinners is so unlike most every previous Best Picture contender in style and story, but for a long time, I thought the most analogous to its standing as a nominee was 2022 winner Everything Everywhere All At Once: a deeply original film that didn't exactly spell 'commercial success' or 'cultural zeitgeist' and somehow achieved both. Through that lens, I thought its lack of significant wins for a good bit of the awards circuit-- in contrast to EEAAO's famous clean sweep through it --spelled trouble for its chances at major awards. Now, in the wake of a record-setting number of nominations, and a couple significant award wins, I'm realizing I may have looked to the wrong previous nominees for inspiration. It's a little bit Get Out, the 2017 nominee that was an atypical "Oscar movie" but a beloved force all the same, blending genres including horror to teach a nuanced and fresh lesson on race. And it's a little bit Barbie, the 2023 nominee that smashed box office records and racked up the most nominations of any movie that year, to the delight of its millions of fans. A key distinction? Whereas a lot of the perceived momentum those movies picked up close to the awards were generated not by wins but rather hopium, Sinners is starting to pick up notable awards steam by, well, winning awards.
It's not often the Academy gets the opportunity to award Best Picture to one of the biggest movies of the year, not just the most-acclaimed, without surely eliciting a cry from the movie-lover masses that the Oscars are selling out and this is wildly undeserved. Sinners gives them that opportunity. Don't be surprised if they take it.
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