🎧 ‘Sinners’ vs. ‘One Battle’: Warners Takes on Warners in the Oscars

Why I don’t envy the studio’s tough awards campaigns ahead, and state of the race with Tyler Coates

DOUBLE TROUBLE Michael B. Jordan plays twins in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which is a top awards contender despite its early release. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

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Here’s how quickly awards season narratives can change. Coming out of the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals a few weeks ago, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet looked like the film to beat, earning critical raves and the kind of audible sobs in theaters that feel very hard to deny. But then the day after Hamnet made its Toronto bow, word started emerging from the Los Angeles premiere of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. When that many people are so free with the word “masterpiece,” you have to assume something major is incoming.

Or maybe the frontrunner throughout all of this has been Sinners, the springtime box office hit and cultural phenomenon that put 39-year-old Ryan Coogler firmly at the top of his generation’s pack of filmmakers. That film’s Oscar campaign hasn’t even started yet, but I’ve got it on good authority that things will start ramping up soon enough — and when they do, Sinners could prove difficult to beat.

I wrote about all of this in last week’s Prestige Junkie newsletter, revealing my own predictions for the best picture 10. On today’s podcast, Tyler Coates and I have a more expansive version of that conversation, looking not only at what we see as the frontrunners but at larger questions we’ll be discussing all season. I’m particularly fascinated by the enviable dilemma facing Warner Bros., which released both Sinners and One Battle After Another and now has to navigate two Oscar campaigns for big, muscular American epics made by brand-name auteurs. (They also have Weapons and best supporting actress passion pick Amy Madigan, but that feels like a slightly easier needle to thread.)

Tyler, meanwhile, is keeping an eye on James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash and whether the 20th Century Studios release can maintain the Oscar success of the franchise’s predecessors (13 overall nominations, including best picture twice). He also suspects that One Battle After Another — which focuses on a one-time left-wing revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) who tries to find his daughter (Chase Infiniti) before a racist government official (Sean Penn) does first — will meet the political moment in unexpected ways.

“It feels like it was made two weeks ago,” Tyler tells me of One Battle After Another, which opens with the liberation of an immigration detention center and features a subplot about a white supremacist cabal that secretly holds influence over the country’s political elite. “And when we talk about politics and our current time — I mean, I saw it twice before the Charlie Kirk assassination. Then when that happened, I was like, oh, Jesus, this is going to be really something.”

Hear all of that and much more on today’s episode of the podcast. As always, paid Prestige Junkie After Party subscribers can watch the full video version and access many other special podcast episodes. And if you haven’t yet checked out our newly relaunched and quite gorgeous Prestige Junkie Pundits page, you can head there to see both my and Tyler’s Oscar predictions — feel free to tell us what we’ve got wrong. After all, it’s still only September! As always, I’m katey@theankler.com.