When Sinners recently received a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations, the response was overwhelmingly celebratory, but not uncomplicated.
The nominations capped a year in which the film had already defied expectations at the box office. An original horror film with no built-in franchise, Sinners broke multiple domestic and international records and earned more than US$300 million during its theatrical run.
Critics also responded strongly, praising Ryan Coogler’s direction and the film’s blend of spectacle and social commentary. Those reviews helped cement Sinners as both a commercial hit and a critical success.
Sinners doesn’t resolve longstanding debates about Black recognition or racial equity in Hollywood. However, its nominations arrive at a moment that suggests wider audience interest – and possible film industry openness – to Black films that are culturally specific, formally ambitious and uninterested in proving their importance through suffering alone.
Questions of popular success and excellence
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – the group of just over 10,000 film industry professionals who vote on Oscar nominations and winners – has long grappled with how to balance popular success and its self-image as an arbiter of artistic excellence.
In the wake of declining viewership, the academy proposed a new category in 2018 for “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film.”
The plan was met with significant backlash from commentators who were offended by the implication that commercially successful films couldn’t also be great art. The idea was shelved amid concerns that it would undermine the Oscars’ standards instead of bridging the gap between popular taste and critical recognition.
Sinners is not a traditional prestige drama designed for the awards circuit. It is a piece of work that refuses easy classification, blending elements of horror, musical, Southern Gothic and Black folklore into a form that balances excess and control.
As director Ryan Coogler has said, the film resists categorical conventions, dubbing it “genre-fluid.”
Directorial innovation
Coogler’s directorial innovation is central to the cultural significance of the film’s nominations.
Historically, the Oscars have rewarded Black films that conform to a narrow range of familiar narratives. Stories centred on racial trauma, historical injustice, moral redemption or social pathology have been far more likely to receive acknowledgement than films that foreground pleasure and fantasy.
Best Picture winners like 12 Years a Slave and Green Book, along with heavily awarded films such as Precious and The Help, illustrate this pattern, as does Halle Berry’s Best Actress win for Monster’s Ball, a performance structured around sexualized suffering and endurance.
Acclaimed Black films that don’t focus on trauma or suffering have been long overlooked by the academy.
Movies like Do the Right Thing, Eve’s Bayou, Girls Trip and Sorry to Bother You received strong critical and cultural support, but were largely ignored during Oscar voting.
Rather than critiquing those films or performances, this pattern points to how Hollywood taste – reflecting racialized assumptions and values – shapes what kinds of Black stories are recognized as important and deserving of reward.
Black creative achievement and possibility
Sinners does something different. It bends and unsettles the frames that tell audiences how to read a film. Vampires, music, violence, sex and history are woven together in a way that invites audiences in, without stopping to explain or defend each choice.
The film draws on familiar genre esthetics that white audiences recognize (like horror, spectacle, supernatural myth) but it refuses to translate its cultural references or soften its Black specificity.
Viewers unfamiliar with Black Southern folklore, diasporic spiritual traditions or the film’s musical and historical cues may miss things. The film does not slow down to catch them up.
Award bodies’ reception
The film’s success also raises questions about how awards bodies respond when Black creative experimentation gains critical acclaim.
A recent example comes from the Recording Academy. After Beyoncé won Best Country Album in 2025, the Grammys split the category into “traditional” and “contemporary” – a change that expanded recognition while also reintroducing distinctions.
The move echoed earlier controversies around genre-labelling, including debates over the now-retired “urban” category. It also underscored how recognition can be followed by new forms of sorting rather than lasting structural change.
Wider shift in Black creative possibility
The risk is that Sinners is celebrated as a one-off, rather than understood as part of a wider shift in Black creative possibility.
Some conservative responses have framed Sinners less as an artistic achievement and more as an example of cultural overreach, reading its genre play and historical remixing as ideological provocation rather than creative labour.
Alongside this, the film’s record-breaking nominations are likely to be interpreted by some viewers or critics as further evidence of a so-called “woke era” in awards culture, a framing that tends to downplay the craft, ambition and substance of works featuring Black talent.
These reactions reveal ongoing anxieties over who gets to reshape tradition, and how recognition by industry powerbrokers is interpreted when it is attached to Black cultural production.
Reputational weight, star power
Sinners could take these creative risks in part because of the reputational weight behind it.
Coogler’s track record of commercially successful films, combined with the star power of Michael B. Jordan and their history of delivering profitable collaborations, created a level of confidence among funding studios that is rarely extended to Black filmmakers more broadly.
The uneven distribution of that creative latitude and resourcing remains visible across the industry, where many Black directors continue to face funding barriers for innovative or less conventional projects.
Challenging esthetic norms
The academy recently introduced representation and inclusion standards for Best Picture eligibility that require films to meet benchmarks for on-screen representation, creative leadership, industry access or audience outreach to be considered for nomination.
These measures are aimed at expanding opportunities for underrepresented groups, yet they focus on who appears in and works on films rather than on how films innovate or challenge esthetic norms.
As a result, longstanding assumptions about genre bias and what counts as quality cinema are largely unexamined, even as the rules change around how films qualify for consideration.
Works that trust audiences
The recognition of Sinners by the academy points to a widening space for Black films rooted in lived experience, place and history. Similar dynamics are visible elsewhere.
Recent global successes like K-Pop Demon Hunters show that viewers are drawn to genre-blended, culturally grounded stories that stimulate the imagination rather than explain themselves away. These works trust audiences to enter unfamiliar worlds without constant translation.
Sinners belongs to this moment. Its record-breaking nominations expand the range of Black cinema visible at the highest levels of recognition and quietly signal greater room for formal experimentation. The film treats Black creativity as something that can include visual excess, genre experimentation and narrative openness, and still be recognized as artistically rigorous work.
Cornel Grey, Assistant Professor in Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Western University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Expert Insight reflects the perspective and scholarly interest of Western faculty members and is not an articulation of official university policy on issues being addressed.
