2026 Oscars: Can Sinners Beat One Battle After Another for Best Picture?

The Academy and Hollywood are about to have a big mess on their hands. They are about to show the people outside the bubble who loved the movie Sinners that the movie inside the bubble, One Battle After Another, is the one they chose. This has happened a few times, famously, throughout the decades, going back to Citizen Kane vs. How Green Was My Valley.

People have already noticed an odd thing unfolding with Sinners. It was left off the top twenty — TWENTY — at Variety and the Top Ten at Rolling Stone. Some are asking, what does a Black director have to do to make a mark in Hollywood? Sinners was made for less than One Battle After Another and made more money than One Battle After Another. It was filmed on large-format IMAX. It’s an original screenplay that made the most money, at least in America, of the original movie trifecta: Sinners, One Battle, Weapons, and F1. So why wouldn’t it be winning?

I watch them talking about it online, and I think, I know what’s coming next. The Academy added 3,000 new members to “diversify” their voting body, but they plucked them mostly from the international pile, where they don’t seem to be as social-justice-oriented so much as they are virtue signal-oriented (like Everything Everywhere All At Once, like CODA, like One Battle After Another). Sinners ain’t that. It doesn’t virtue signal at all. It is a story about what Ryan Coogler calls strength in the face of adversity.

We’ve seen plenty of movies about the Deep South — slavery, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights. We’ve also seen race-themed imaginative horror, like Get Out and Us. But we’ve never seen anything like Sinners before. It’s true that Get Out entered the pantheon. People always reference it because it was told from a specific point of view, and it rang true. One Battle After Another is not a film from the POV of a Black director, though it makes bold statements about race. It’s just that it’s from the perspective of a white man, the one good white guy in an otherwise “white supremacist” “fascist” nation.

So, film critics — mostly dude-bro types, but women too — like that message of the one good white guy, but more than that, they like the girl boss “she saves herself” narrative, which gives them exactly what they want in a movie, exactly what they always ask for. But the “white savior” trope plays out because of the “one nice white guy.”

Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t. Maybe you think, can’t a movie just be a movie? And of course it can, but not one so deeply steeped in wokeology like One Battle. It genuflects to the movement, so it can’t ever be just a movie. It reflects the worldview of the entire Left, people like Barack Obama, who just included it (along with Sinners) on his Top Ten list, the Gothams, AFI voters, etc. It is them, and they are it. Everything they have been reflecting outward for these long 15 years is that movie.

Sinners, on the other hand, doesn’t reflect them in any way, and there is no “nice white guy.” It is more complicated than that, and it is not a universal emotional experience. White people probably feel kind of bad and kind of watching it. One Battle gives them a place to land. Okay, I can be the “nice white guy” and feel okay about the world.

The problem is that people out there in the world will notice that Sinners didn’t win and that will start a whole new campaign against the Academy, primarily because One Battle is about race and racism. If it was “just a movie” that told a good story, like Anora or Oppenheimer, no one would be complaining. There is something about the juxtaposition of these movies that will turn into a major story down the road.

No one is accusing One Battle of being The Help or Green Book or anything. There are no charges of racism against it — especially since Paul Thomas Anderson is married to a mixed-race woman, so he is absolved in that, but also he’s more or less a beloved icon among the film industry. So it won’t necessarily be an attack on the movie, except in the way that people will be evaluating it and deciding whether it is really good enough to beat Sinners.

Here are a few videos from TikTok. Some of them go too hard on the industry, I think, but it’s a taste of what’s to come.

The thing is, you can’t force people to vote for a movie they don’t want to vote for, especially not in this case. They will feel very little guilt because they think One Battle After Another sends the right message about race, and Sinners does not.

There is a version of this story where I would defend voting for the movie you like over the one that deserves to win, but in this case, because Film Twitter and Film Critics are, to my mind, damaging not just to movies but to the Oscars. They are a conformist mob, a hive mind, and when they decide to attack you, they come with knives out. This just happened to me — yet again — when a “film critic” decided to attack a tweet of mine about Rob Reiner. It was a throwaway tweet, something I’d been wondering about, and of course, it went viral.

These are the same people who threw a 48-hour fit because I said I didn’t like how actors read Shakespeare (except for those who are good at it, and most aren’t). They see a mob, and they all pile on, even some Oscar bloggers did.

So I am not that invested in protecting them from what’s coming next. I gave up the need to be seen as “good” by them a long time ago. I know that I am a good person who wants to do the right thing and it doesn’t matter what they think of me. You have to believe in yourself, especially in times like this when the witch hunt mobs are out in force and are destroying art.

But here is what we’ll be looking at, probably. Sinners did everything One Battle did and ran circles around it.

Better liked, better reviewed, made more money, became a cultural zeitgeist, everyone in America — or a lot of people saw it and liked it. Not everyone, of course. Some thought it was “anti-white” but it is less “anti-white” than One Battle After Another, that much I can say for sure.

I think Sinners should win because it is what the industry should call “Best Picture of the Year,” that it would make history for Ryan Coogler as the first Black director to win in (say it with me now) 98 years of Oscar history is just the gravy.

But I also know what is ahead when One Battle After Another beats it at the major guilds and Sinners is given Original Screenplay like Get Out, BlackKklansman, Precious, American Fiction. True, Moonlight and 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture and Screenplay, they did not win Best Director.

The industry has been virtue signaling and sidelining white men for a long time, since 2014. At least, according to this Compact story. 

You’d think, given that, there would be more progress in terms of wins for talented directors like Ryan Coogler whose successful films were no favors given. He has earned his place with high box office returns and his fiercely original magical, realistic horror film, Sinners.

By the end of the Oscars this year, people will be asking, what’s a guy gotta do? Having film critics in charge of the Oscars was just part of the reason the whole thing began to fall apart. The audience has to matter. What film fans think has to matter. Those directors who brought people out to the theater multiple times to see the movie has to matter. At least, if you want a thriving film business that lasts.

Sinners will likely lead the nominations, heading in with:

Picture
Director
Screenplay
Actor
Supporting Actress
Editing
Cinematography
Score
Song
Costume
Production Design
Visual Effects
Sound
Casting

That’s 14. 12 Years a Slave earned 9, the most of any Black Director in Oscar history. If Ryan Coogler blows it out of the water with 13, considering everything else, is this industry really gonna deny him and his brilliant film the top prize?

I have no idea. I can’t read the room. We won’t really know until the wins start coming down but when it comes to thousands and thousands of people voting, as opposed to hundreds of people voting, we’ll see where the industry is right now. What I know is this: if Ryan Coogler makes history at the DGA it will bring the house down and the whole thing will tilt in Sinners direction. The DGA goes first and it will set the tone for everything that comes next.