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The movie, which had a budget of around $100 million, achieved the perfect blend of technical craft, storytelling, and performances that allowed it to dominate across the board, including nominations for Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan), a Best Director nod for Coogler, and, of course, Best Picture. The latter wasn’t a surprise, but is notable: Sinners is now only the eighth horror movie ever to be nominated for the biggest Academy Award of them all, as the table below outlines:
| Oscars Year | Movie |
|---|---|
| 1974 | The Exorcist |
| 1976 | Jaws |
| 1992 | The Silence of the Lambs |
| 2000 | The Sixth Sense |
| 2011 | Black Swan |
| 2018 | Get Out |
| 2025 | The Substance |
| 2026 | Sinners |
That achievement alone puts Sinners in rareified air, but it could go even further. Of those, only one horror movie has actually gone on to win Best Picture: The Silence of the Lambs, way back in 1992. Over thirty years later, could Sinners be about to change that?
Will Sinners Win Best Picture?
Sinners was already a strong contender, but its 16 nominations obviously push it to the very front of the pack. That kind of recognition is very difficult to overlook, showing just how popular it is with every branch of the Academy and making it a pretty easy vote in so many categories. It’s clearly a movie that they want to recognize, and with it being such a cultural moment, then it’s one they might not want to pass up on (not to mention, it is great).
In terms of Oscars history, it’s tempting to look at the previous record holders and how they fared: All About Eve and Titanic both won Best Picture, while La La Land lost out to Moonlight in one of the most shocking Academy Award moments of all time when it was wrongly announced as the winner. That puts the form guide in Sinners‘ favor, but it’s a very small sample size and more importantly, recency is important in looking at the Oscars, because it so often shifts in trends as its voter pool expands and diversifies (which it has a lot in the 2020s). Looking back at the nominee leaders from this decade, it’s a slightly different picture:
| Oscars Year | Most Nominated Movie | Best Picture Winner |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Joker (11) | Parasite |
| 2021 | Mank (10) | Nomadland |
| 2022 | The Power of the Dog (12) | CODA |
| 2023 | Everything Everywhere All At Once (11) | Everything Everywhere All At Once |
| 2024 | Oppenheimer (13) | Oppenheimer |
| 2025 | Emilia Perez (13) | Anora |
Only twice this decade has the most nominated movie gone on to take the Best Picture prize, but they’re also, perhaps, the two that are most similar to Sinners in nature: they were movies that became, to varying degrees, genuine events (the word-of-mouth sleeper sensation of EEAAO and the Barbenheimer phenomenon), which is true of Sinners. Joker and Emilia Perez were both marred by controversies that limited their chances, and the latter, along with Mank and Power, were all Netflix movies, which has yet to result in a Best Picture win.
Just a couple of months ago, One Battle After Another had seemed like the clear frontrunner, but this now very much seems like a two-horse race (and that movie’s 13 nominations isn’t exactly a bad haul). One key advantage for Sinners, though, is that it didn’t suffer any obvious snubs. OBAA missed out on Best Actress for Chase Infiniti, for example, while moving further down the race, Hamnet‘s Paul Mescal also missed out on the Best Supporting Actor nod, Guillermo del Toro didn’t get Best Director for Frankenstein, and so on. Sinners has the broadest love, which is a very good sign, and it feels like it has a realistic chance in the key categories that foretell Best Picture (such as Coogler for Original Screenplay).
