Sinners Scores a Record Sixteen Oscar Nominations

When Sinners, which stars Michael B. Jordan as the twins Smoke and Stack, was released last April, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis called it “a big-screen exultation—a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies.” And as David Canfield points out in the Hollywood Reporter, Sinners “became the highest-grossing original movie domestically in fifteen years, going back to Christopher Nolan’s Inception, after a road to theatrical release trailed by industry skepticism and controversy.” For more on that, see A. A. Dowd’s excellent piece for the American Prospect, “The Hit Hollywood Didn’t Want.”

There’s nothing at all shabby about racking up thirteen nominations, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another had been sailing so smoothly through this months-long awards season that it’s going to surprise a lot of Oscarologists to see that they suddenly have a genuine race to track. Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling, who report for the NYT on the business end of the art we love, note as many have before that both Sinners and One Battle “were produced by Warner Bros., the studio that Netflix and Paramount Skydance are fighting each other to purchase. Studios have mostly stopped making these kinds of movies, instead pursuing spectacle-driven sequels with the potential for $500 million or more in box-office returns. (In fact, the Warner Bros. executives who backed One Battle After Another and Sinners, Mike De Luca and Pamela Abdy, were widely expected to lose their jobs for taking those swings. Now they look shrewd.)”

Tied with nine nominations each are Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet scores eight, and there are four with four: Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, Joseph Kosinski’s F1, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, and Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams. The day will be spent sorting through snubs and surprises (see, for example, Deadline’s Dominic Patten, the Hollywood Reporter’s Hilary Lewis, the Los Angeles Times’ Glenn Whipp, the NYT’s Kyle Buchanan, the Playlist’s Gregory Ellwood, Variety’s William Earl, and Vulture’s Nate Jones)—until the first reviews out of Sundance hit, and the new year truly begins.