Taking Stock of the ‘Sinners’ Vibe Shift
The surge of enthusiasm for Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster can make a difference — just ask ‘Parasite’ and ‘Everything Everywhere’
Oscar ballots! Get your Oscar ballots here! Academy members reading this have until 5 p.m. PT today to make their final picks — if they haven’t already — which should give them just enough time to watch a few of the shorts if they hurry!
For the rest of us, the past few days have felt like a typically quiet denouement to the awards season, with all of the precursor ceremonies in the rearview mirror, most in-person events concluded and not much left to do but wait for Sunday, March 15. I’m taking a beat, too, holding off until next week before publishing my final predictions in every category — they’ll come in two parts in next week’s newsletters, and I’ll also go through all of them on the Prestige Junkie podcast with my colleague Christopher Rosen, who I think is dreading having to make final decisions as much as I am. (For a preview, check out the end of our conversation with Richard Rushfield on yesterday’s episode of Rushfield Lunch!).
Because while it’s undeniably exciting to be nearing the finish line, it’s a little sad to winnow down all these months of possibility into a final set of 25 winners (well, some categories have multiple winners, but you know what I mean). That might be part of what’s been driving what feels like a big momentum swing in the last few days, and renewed speculation that the seemingly anointed best picture winner might not have as clear a path to victory on Oscar night as we thought.
Before the Actor Awards on Sunday night, it felt more like a recreational question, a “what if?” that Oscar watchers come up with to pass the time before the ceremony: Could Sinners — the bigger hit, with the most nominations in Academy history — actually sneak past the juggernaut frontrunner One Battle After Another to win best picture?
Over the weekend, One Battle won the Producers Guild Award, as had been widely predicted, and Sinners took the top prize from the Screen Actors Guild, which was expected, too. In theory, the status quo has held, and One Battle After Another remains as much a frontrunner today as it was three months ago. But when you combine Michael B. Jordan’s win for best actor on Sunday and the overwhelming enthusiasm in that room for both him and the Sinners cast, there’s really only one way to describe it: a vibe shift.
By the Numbers
This entire concept sounds absurd to the Oscar pundits who believe in the data above all, who know that the stats reveal that only half of the Actor Awards ensemble winners go on to win best picture and that with wins from the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild, the BAFTAs and a ton of critics groups and industry guilds, One Battle After Another is in a nearly unbeatable position at the top of the field. These people are correct and have much better awards season memories than I do. Yes, Oscar races constantly make room for surprises and history-making wins. But when in doubt, the numbers will usually tell you what’s going to happen.
Except, of course, when they don’t.
In 2020, 1917 won best picture at the Producers Guild and BAFTA (and also bagged best director for Sam Mendes at the Directors Guild Awards), and yet when Parasite won the SAG ensemble award, it sparked a late surge that pushed it to become the first non-English-language movie to win the Oscars’ top prize. Two years later, during a contentious battle with The Power of the Dog, family drama CODA won at SAG before becoming the first movie released by a streamer to win best picture. And although Everything Everywhere All at Once was an incredibly strong frontrunner during its run in 2022 (it won both the PGA and DGA), its sheer dominance at SAG (where Jamie Lee Curtis was a surprise winner, and Michelle Yeoh reasserted her strength against the formidable Cate Blanchett) and the response from those in the room made its seven Oscar wins a few weeks later all but a fait accompli, despite its failure to beat back All Quiet on the Western Front at BAFTA.
The main thing that all three of those films have in common with Sinners, aside from the SAG ensemble win, is a distinct, enviable energy. Or, as Actor Awards host Kristen Bell put it when she took the mic following Delroy Lindo’s speech on behalf of the ensemble, “It even feels electric standing next to you guys.” Part of that energy came from Lindo and Jordan’s speeches, acknowledging both their own work and the magnitude of what Sinners accomplished overall. A significant part also came from presenters Viola Davis and Samuel L. Jackson, who, respectively, read the best actor and best ensemble results with as much enthusiasm as if they’d made the film themselves. (Jackson, who swept Spike Lee into a bear hug when Lee won his BlacKkKlansman Oscar, is especially good at this kind of cheerleading.)
It was all an incredible contrast to when Lindo and Jordan were onstage together at the BAFTA Awards just a week earlier, standing in stunned silence as they heard the racial slur involuntarily shouted by Tourette’s syndrome advocate John Davidson. That incident didn’t come up onstage at the Actor Awards but was a recurring theme at the NAACP Image Awards the night before. Presenter and One Battle After Another star Regina Hall addressed Jordan and Lindo as “the two kings in the audience,” and thanked them for their class. When Lindo took the stage later, he expressed thanks for the love and support he’d been shown, calling it “a classic case of something that could be very negative becoming something very positive.”
The Favorite
Even though One Battle After Another has had two major victories in the past two weeks, winning the top BAFTA prize as well as the PGA Award, the film that everyone has been talking about after all of the televised awards shows has been Sinners. For a movie that opened in theaters nearly a year ago, that already made a raft of headlines when it set the all-time Oscar nominations record and that seemed to have already pulled out all the stops in its awards season campaign, that’s a pretty remarkable feat.
Being the movie everyone is talking about in the final days of Oscar voting can make a huge difference — just ask CODA, Parasite or even All Quiet on the Western Front, which didn’t win best picture but surged at the BAFTA Awards on its way toward four Oscar wins. Then again, we’ve seen hugely popular SAG ensemble winners become best picture also-rans, including Conclave just last year. With more than 160,000 voters spread across the country, SAG can lean more populist and more American than the Oscars, two factors that presumably worked in favor of Sinners here.
It all brings us back to the same question we’ve had for months: Can Sinners really win it all? For now, I’m leaning toward no, assuming that the numbers and precedent will bear out and One Battle After Another will win best picture as well as best director, with a screenplay prize for Ryan Coogler and a lot of crafts awards going to Sinners. The vibe has shifted in favor of Sinners undeniably, but with competition as strong as One Battle After Another, I don’t think it’s quite enough to upend the balance entirely.
That said — how incredibly lucky are we that the best picture race has boiled down to these two films, from two generation-defining directors who seem to admire each other so much, and from a studio that was willing to take such huge risks to make them. As much as I love many of the other films in this year’s best picture lineup, Sinners and One Battle After Another are undeniably the definitive movies of 2025. No matter how many Oscars either of them wins, it probably won’t feel like enough.