2026 Oscar Predictions: What Makes Sinners a Strong Contender

To understand why Sinners is strong heading into Oscar season is to understand this moment and these voters. This does not mean Sinners is for sure going to win Best Picture, but there are reasons to believe it has major heat heading into the Film Festival phase of the Oscar race.

Start with this: the only reason the Oscars have become “Best Picture from a Film Festival” is that major Hollywood parted ways with prestige picks years ago, leaving only the festival niche circuit to find movies Oscar voters liked.

There is nothing good about a Best Picture winner that is cultivated in the hot house, curated specifically for Oscar voters, then set before them like it’s the First Class section of the airplane. Meanwhile, back in Coach, it’s “let them eat marvel.” Ideally, Best Picture is a zeitgeist movie, one that grabs us as a society and holds us in its thrall for a season.

That is what happened when the masterpiece, The Silence of the Lambs, was released back in 1991. Ryan Coogler has said that with Sinners, he wanted to make a movie like we all would have seen in the 1990s and The Silence of the Lambs was that movie. I saw it three times in one day, bringing a different set of friends with me to see it. “You HAVE to see this movie,” I said.

Now, I’ve watched it so many times, and know every line, I’ve worn out the groove. But back then, it felt fresh and new. To this day, everyone knows Hannibal Lecter from that first movie. Everything that came after, almost no one knows.

Sinners isn’t quite a movie on that level because no movie is now, with very few exceptions, and I can’t even think of one in the past ten years, certainly not one that won Best Picture. But Sinners is a zeitgeist movie for a variety of reasons.

The first is that it did slot into “the discourse” on Twitter about race. That isn’t the main reason it would win. If that worked, all of the people I championed for years would have Oscars by now. The “racism discourse” only takes a movie so far. There have to be other reasons beyond just making history for the first Black director to win, as this would.

So what are those reasons? Let’s go through them.

It’s dazzlingly, brilliantly written, directed, and acted.

The first thing to know about Sinners is just that it’s a good movie. From minute one, Ryan Coogler is in full command of this material. He knows exactly what tone he wants for this gothic horror film with music at its core, not just any music, the legend of Robert Johnson.

The more you know about Robert Johnson’s life, the more you will appreciate Sinners. This film is his echo, even if not a direct telling of his life. Robert Johnson, as a young man, was a mediocre guitar player, so the story goes. He was booed off stage enough times that he decided to leave. He famously “went to the Crossroads” and came back as a brilliant musician. No one could believe the transformation, and the legend was born.

Because he was suddenly so brilliant, it had to be that he made a deal with the Devil and sold his south to play like that. But other details of his life weave their way through Coogler’s masterpiece, starting with how his father (stepfather) was a successful farmer who was chased off his land by the white farmers. It was so bad that Johnson’s father had to change his last name and move to a different town. We see that storyline play out in this movie too, more or less, though not exactly.

Then there is the story of the women in Johnson’s life. He married a 14 year-old when he was around the same age. Both wife and baby would die in childbirth – we see that in Sinners, too. Then, Johnson supposedly died when he was poisoned by having an affair with a married woman whose husband got jealous and poisoned him. That is also in Sinners.

Miles Caton plays the young guitarist who meets up with the twins, both played by Michael B. Jordan. This is Johnson going to the Crossroads, and everything that happens in Sinners explains how he became such a legendary musician, or at least that’s the subtle subtext to tell this story.

Sinners is Coogler’s style – his own – it is not copied from any other director, and it’s not trying to be any kind of movie except what it authentically is. That’s what I loved about it, the freedom he has as a storyteller to tell this story with music and imagery that looks like nothing we’ve seen before.

The best thing about Sinners is that it takes its time to get to the horror elements, like Ridley Scott’s Alien. That gives us a chance to get to know the characters, the haunting mood of the story, and a sense of place. It’s a slow burn, which might explain why so many people kept going back to see it again. They didn’t just want to watch the violence and gore.

Even though it takes place in the Deep South during Jim Crow, it isn’t a movie about Black suffering – there are no whippings or lynchings. It’s more about the characters rather than any kind of overriding theme like “white people are bad.” That means anyone can watch it and at least get it, if not love it.

It’s a movie in a movie theater that lots of people went to see

The first thing to know about Sinners is that they defied the odds to become a hit. If you’ll recall, just before the film came out, the studio was a little nervous. There was the false presumption that the movie would be “woke” at a time when audiences were losing interest, as in films like Snow White, etc. But that turned out to be wrong. It wasn’t only Black audiences that turned out, everyone did. Before the buzz morphed into “the discourse” everyone was talking about Sinners. It’s one of those must-see, crackling heat movie experiences that everyone wants to be part of, which is the best way to sell a movie now.

It’s filmed on film, not digital, and large format. That is partly what makes some filmmakers like Christopher Nolan so beloved in the industry. It’s harder to make a movie on film, but it always has a different feel about it than digital. The Brutalist was shot on film.

Two Best Picture winners in a row were shot on Film, Oppenheimer and Anora. This year we have:

Sinners
After the Hunt
The Phoenician Scheme
Bugonia
Marty Supreme
The Smashing Machine
One Battle After Another (Vistavision)
Roofman
Jay Kelly

It does feel like a trend of late to shoot on film, weirdly enough. But with Sinners, you can see it. You can see the grain. And speaking of making history:

It’s a “Kicking Puppy” movie

The big threats in the Oscar race are what I call “kicking puppy” movies. That means no one can attack them and not come out looking like the bad guy. CODA, Everything Everywhere All At Once, The King’s Speech, Argo – there is something about them that makes people feel protective of the film. Good luck attacking Sinners …

And all of this before we get to the making history for Black filmmakers part of this Oscar story, which will be a strong motivator if voters don’t feel like they’re being forced to pick a movie they didn’t like just to make history.

I don’t think the new international voters care that much about “making history.” I think they like dazzling, inventive, original cinema, and at the moment, Sinners owns that category too.

But it is early yet. There are so many films yet to see. Whatever they are, they have to be able to top Sinners in terms of vision, execution, box office, and zeitgeist. Maybe one will, who knows.

Right now, the only movie that has a secure place and potentially challenges Sinners is Sentimental Value. That could be big with international voters and with those who are hesitant to vote for a horror movie. It would be in keeping with the Academy’s history of picking the smaller, character film rather than the one that stands the test of time.

So, how many nominations can Sinners get?

Picture
Director
Screenplay
Actor
Supporting Actress
Supporting Actor
Cinematography
Editing
Sound
Costume
Production Design
Score
Hair & Makeup
Casting

That would 14 nominations. Probably it won’t get all of those. Supporting Actor is tough because Miles Caton will go up against Delroy Lindo and might cancel each other out. We’ll just have to see what else the industry puts out that can compete.

My predictions:

Picture