‘Sinners,’ ‘Barbie’ & Oscar Double Standards That Won’t Go Away
Plus: ‘The Bear’ makes another reservation, and the return of James L. Brooks in more ways than one
Welcome back, everyone, from what was hopefully a restful long holiday weekend, despite all the challenging political news, mediocre multiplex options and what may still be fireworks going off outside your window every night. (I love fireworks, but they have a time limit, and it has passed!)
Later this week, I’ll be looking at the final tea leaves for this year’s Emmy nominations, which are set to be announced next Tuesday, July 15, with What We Do in the Shadows star Harvey Guillén and Running Point actress Brenda Song sharing hosting duties. Both of their shows are underdogs with realistic possibilities for major nominations, so that adds some extra drama to the proceedings. And since it’s happening at 8:30 a.m. PT and not the crack of dawn like the Oscar nominations, you might actually be inclined to turn on the livestream.
Before diving back into Emmys, though, I’m catching up with some stories that emerged during last week’s slow news cycle, from what seems to be a never-ending drip of trailers for anticipated fall releases to the streaming premiere that could be the first significant move of Oscar season.
The Year’s First Frontrunner
As I wrote about last week, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is finally available to stream, launching on HBO Max as the perfect kind of holiday weekend counterprogramming. And with all due respect to F1 and everything else still drawing audiences in theaters, the streaming release has only strengthened Sinners’ status as the blockbuster everyone wants to talk about — and yes, that includes conservative trolls who have renewed their commitment to getting mad about it.
Sinners was already an unusual kind of viral phenomenon, drawing audiences to theaters without a TikTok gimmick like A Minecraft Movie (with its chicken jockeys) or Minions: The Rise of Gru (and its Gentleminions). Now that it’s streaming and much easier to make GIFs of its most spellbinding sequences, though, Sinners is poised to go viral all over again. Can you imagine anyone who hasn’t seen it coming across this TikTok and not wanting to see what the rest of the movie has in store?
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The July 4 streaming premiere date for Sinners was surely chosen for a multitude of reasons. Still, I can’t help but think of it in Oscar terms and, specifically, a very recent precedent. Barbie waited until mid-December, months after its late July release, to finally make its streaming debut on Max — yes, once again right before a major holiday and even more pointedly in the thick of the Oscar precursor season. By then, it was already clear that Barbie would be overshadowed in the Oscar race by its release date twin, Oppenheimer, but a holiday season resurgence of “I’m Just Ken” memes was a pretty good way to remind everyone which was the movie of 2023.
Further symmetry between these two Warner Bros. blockbusters can be found behind the camera. Before Barbie, Greta Gerwig directed two best picture nominees (Lady Bird and Little Women); before Sinners, Coogler was also responsible for two best picture nominees himself, directing Marvel’s Black Panther and producing Judas and the Black Messiah, Shaka King’s 2021 film about Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. (Coogler was not a producer on Black Panther and wasn’t nominated as part of the movie’s seven overall nominations; he’s received two Oscar nominations thus far, as producer on Judas and the Black Messiah and a co-writer on Rihanna’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever song, “Lift Me Up.”) The movies, of course, also face separate but related double standards that continue to vex the Academy and its directing branch. Barbie was consistently underestimated for its unapologetic, pink girliness and mainstream appeal, and those factors likely contributed to the then 40-year-old Gerwig’s snub in the best director category. Meanwhile, the freakout around Coogler’s power as a young, Black director is already well underway. Coogler, 39, who famously turned down the opportunity to be part of the Academy, would be only the seventh Black director to be nominated in the category and the first since Spike Lee for BlacKkKlansman in 2019. (The others in addition to Lee: Jon Singleton for Boyz n the Hood in 1992, Lee Daniels for Precious in 2010, Steve McQueen for 12 Years a Slave in 2014, Barry Jenkins for Moonlight in 2017 and Jordan Peele for Get Out in 2018.) For all the ways the Academy’s expansion has allowed for a broader range of international auteurs to be recognized, the directors’ branch been shockingly behind on acknowledging homegrown talent working within Hollywood itself, especially those filmmakers who dared to make a movie embraced by the public (see also Top Gun: Maverick and Wicked, best picture nominees that failed to secure corresponding nominations for directors Joseph Kosinski and Jon M. Chu, respectively).
We’ll have plenty of time to get into the sexism, racism, snobbery and whatever else crops up around Sinners’ inevitable Oscar run. However, I’ll be keeping a particularly watchful eye on whether blockbusters like Sinners, those films that are popular, fun, and often aimed at underserved audiences, can ever receive the Oscar respect they deserve. Sure, the Oppenheimer best picture win was a huge step for the modern Academy in acknowledging a populist hit — and Everything Everywhere All At Once, while not on the same level as Sinners, felt like the Academy embracing the zeitgeist. But recent Oscar history is dotted with films like Coogler’s own Black Panther —movies that are big enough to be invited to the best picture party but then only considered win-competitive in below-the-line categories.
Could Sinners be an opportunity to make up for that, finally? Nominations for Coogler as best director and star Michael B. Jordan — the two nominations that Barbie most famously missed out on — would be a great place to start. But the longer I keep seeing Sinners GIFs or references to “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” the more I’ll wonder if Sinners is an obvious best picture winner. In the competition to become the most talked-about movie of 2025, at least, it’s so far ahead I’m not sure anyone is capable of catching up.
The Future of The Bear
It’s been nearly two weeks since season 4 of The Bear premiered under so much secrecy that even the episode titles remained embargoed for a full 18 hours after they launched on Hulu. It’s unclear to me when the statute of limitations on spoilers expires for something that extreme, but I’m going to assume it’s okay to risk it.
So opt out here if you don’t want to read on…
Even though the season finale, in which Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy reveals his plan to leave the restaurant and hand things over to Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney, is titled “Goodbye,” there is still more of The Bear coming. Last week, FX announced that the Emmy-winning series had been renewed for a fifth season, with no promised end in sight. The announcement came with a group of pull quotes from reviews of the new season promising that it “recaptures its fire” and is “as confident and singular in its artistic vision as ever,” in addition to a quote promising, quite pointedly, for Emmy voters, “The Bear is most definitely a comedy.”
Given the more negative reviews the show has received in its third and fourth seasons, there was an irresistible sense of art imitating life on the show as Carmy and the team tried to rebound from a mixed restaurant review and get back to basics. The potential for a series reset in a fifth season, with Carmy off on his own adventure while Sydney, Natalie (Abby Elliott) and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) keep the restaurant going, certainly feels like it could be a thrilling shift after multiple seasons of every character feeling stuck in place. (If that’s the direction creator Christopher Storer goes, it’s also probably a way to juggle what will become increasingly busy schedules for White, Edebiri and Moss-Bachrach as their respective movie careers continue to accelerate.)
From a business perspective, a fifth season of The Bear makes perfect sense. It’s still a massive hit by the fractured standards of modern TV audiences, and with Moss-Bachrach starring in the potential hit Fantastic Four this month and White’s performance as Bruce Springsteen coming this awards season, the show’s stars might be even bigger deals by the time it returns. However, the question remains of how much story The Bear really has left to tell, and whether audiences — and awards voters — will embrace the series after a creative dip.
But whatever season 5 will look like, the embargoes around it will surely be strict enough that we won’t know anything about the episodes until after it premieres. And the episode titles? We’ll be lucky if they reveal them at all.
A James L. Brooks State of Mind
It’s been a fantastic few weeks for needle drops in trailers, starting with the blaring arrival of Green Day’s “Basket Case” in the trailer for Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia and the unexpectedly perfect pairing of Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” in our first look at next spring’s sci-fi thriller Project Hail Mary. Call me sentimental, but my favorite has to be the perfectly plaintive “Ooh La La” as used in the trailer for Cannes hit Sentimental Value:
Like all the other uncultured swine who didn’t make it to Cannes, I still haven’t seen this family drama from Norwegian director Joachim Trier, though I think it’s a safe bet I’ll have my chance during a few fall festivals. The film, a grand prix winner at Cannes this year, is getting strong supporting actor buzz for Stellan Skarsgård and might have even more breakout hit potential than Trier’s previous film, The Worst Person in the World, which earned Oscar nominations for best international feature and best original screenplay.
The wistful, tragicomic tone of this trailer conjures The Worst Person in the World and some of Trier’s other work. Still, I also couldn’t help but think of the American master of this kind of tone, who may also be part of the fall awards season. James L. Brooks, the TV maestro turned filmmaker who made two of the best films of the 1980s — Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News — is back in December with Ella McCay, his first film in more than 15 years. 20th Century Studios showcased footage at CinemaCon earlier this spring and later shifted the comedy-drama, led by Emma Mackey and featuring an all-star cast that includes The Bear Emmy winners Edebiri and Jamie Lee Curtis, from its planned September release date to December. That could be a show of confidence — recall Searchlight did a similar thing with Poor Things, which was initially dated for early September before moving to December — or perhaps a sign of trouble. Given the tepid reception for Brooks’ two 21st-century films (that would be Spanglish and How Do You Know, as you most likely forgot), it’s hard to know if the old magic is really back.
Then again, Brooks has also produced two of the best coming-of-age movies of this century, The Edge of Seventeen and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, both directed by his former protege Kelly Fremon Craig. Both films had the same knack for realistic, funny, flawed characters as Brooks’ best films and fit right in with what’s being promised by this trailer for Sentimental Value. Could this awards season mark a comeback for the kind of human-scaled dramedies they really, really don’t make anymore? I’ll be sweating like Albert Brooks, waiting to find out.
The best thing that could happen to The Oscars is for SINNERS to sweep all the major categories.
In fact, all other movies should just withdraw from the race, including shorts, docs, international and animated. #ClearTheField