Agree with them or not, these Oscar nominations deliver a pert slap to the accepted assumptions of awards season. The industry had been expecting landslides for classy upmarket fare such as Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle after Another and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and also for Josh Safdie’s delirious comedy Marty Supreme. And that’s what they got.
But perhaps no one expected these titles to get quite as colossal a smackdown as they got from Ryan Coogler’s vampire drama thriller Sinners: a violent, high-energy fantasia about racism, music and the black experience, which has soared ahead with 16 nominations – the most for any film in 97 years of the Academy Awards. Whatever happens on the night itself, Ryan Coogler has made Oscar history.
Despite the snubs to Paul Mescal (not nominated for playing Shakespeare), to the second half of the wicked saga and to Chase Infiniti (ignored for her adored performance as Leonardo DiCaprio’s daughter in One Battle After another), Sinners is now the big story of this Oscar season – perhaps its only story.
During the annual backlash season,the contrarians have been unburdening themselves of their views that no,Hamlet wasn’t inspired by shakespeare’s dead son Hamnet,and no,One Battle After Another doesn’t address the reality of Trumpism.Meanwhile, Sinners has been fighting and winning a quite separate culture war, and bringing off a mighty achievement for a highly individual film, a freaky tale of supernatural evil that riffs shrewdly on the idea that the blues is a genre of music that is consumed by the enemies of its producers. In the words of a character played by Delroy Lindo, himself rightly nominated: “White folks like the blues just fine, just not the people w
