Jeffrey Wells wrote a piece about Sinners possibly winning Best Picture (we do not know if it will or not) and here is what he said about me:
HE sideview: There is irony in Sasha Stone, who is as anti-woke as they come (takes one to know one), pimping Sinners as God’s gift to cinema while excoriating the woke degradation of Hollywood movies that began eight or nine years ago.
The irony is that Sasha doesn’t seem to realize that Sinners — the movie itself, the critical acclaim for it, the apparent likelihood of it winning the Best Picture Oscar a week from today (Sunday, 3.15.26) — Sinners is the very quintessence of the malignancy that she’s been deploring since ’18 or ’19 or certainly since the Great Awokening of ’20.
Sasha replies at 1:30 pm: “What you’re saying applies to One Battle After Another. Sinners is not about wokeness. Its success is not about wokeness. Absolutely not true. Sinners made more money, and has earned better reviews, both from critics and audiences, than any other film in the Best Picture lineup. One Battle After Another is a box-office failure with an asinine, simpleton plot. Wokeness isn’t about black movies. It’s about white people using minority groups to elevate themselves through virtue signalling.” (Sasha will will be writing a lengthier response on awardsdaily.com later today.)
“Sinners is the very quintessence of the malignancy that she’s been deploring since ’18 or ’19 or certainly since the Great Awokening of ’20.”
That is what many people on the Right believe as well, but take it from one who knows: it isn’t true. I made the same argument for Top Gun: Maverick’s win over Everything Everywhere All at Once. People who read this site regularly know that.
There has to be a measure for success beyond the predilections of Film Twitter bros who have built for themselves a utopian diorama where everything is to their exact taste: free movies, swag, publicists kissing their ass, and they get to decide what gets nominated and what wins. The woke movie is the one that makes white people feel good about themselves, and that isn’t Sinners. Maybe some people vote for it for that reason. But that isn’t why I would vote for it, and it isn’t why I think it should win.
It’s easy for me to argue the “woke” side. After 2020, the Oscar race was deconstructed and remade to reflect guilt and shame for the white founders. Everything was “woke.” The BAFTAs brought in select juries to pick “correct” nominees. The Golden Globes were canceled for being racist and then bought by Jay Penske and co. with 300 new members chosen because they were not white. The Academy added roughly 3,000 members to shake up the white male hold on the Oscars.
Every movie, every TV show, every advertisement has to genuflect to the Woketopians so they feel that everything is fair and no marginalized group is left behind. So minorities, for a brief moment, felt power. Doors were opened, deals were made, and white men were essentially blacklisted from working in Hollywood at all. The Great Feminization took whatever was left. Now, we’re stuck with endless screeching feminist movies and awful, agonizing lectures by people who see themselves as “woke.” Think: Jimmy Kimmel. Think: Jon Stewart. Think: Sharon Stone.
But it was never real power. It was power bestowed. So Ryan Coogler took those opportunities, took a major risk, swung from the fences, hit it out of the park, and all anyone can say is, oh, he’s only getting success and awards because he’s black. I think Sinners deserves to win for every other reason except that one.
Every time I see a movie where every single marginalized group is represented, the soul inside of me dies. Every time I see people on social media bitching because so-and-so and such-and-such wasn’t properly represented? I think, shut up. Just shut up. And in a way, that’s what many white people are doing now with Sinners. They’re mad that white people aren’t well represented. Sorry but them’s the breaks. You can’t make a movie about the Jim Crow South and rewrite history.
I had to watch all of the agonizing takes about Sinners on TikTok. If you want to make it a movie that lectures about politics, you can. But I chose to see it instead as a work of art.
Leftists don’t like One Battle After Another because it makes “the revolution” look ridiculous. Fact check: true. The revolution is ridiculous. Just look at the people of Iran and Venezuela celebrating in the streets to see what oppression really looks like. Conservatives don’t like it because it makes ICE look like the Gestapo. So people have mistaken this for a “balanced” look at Left and Right, like, say, Eddington. It isn’t. The movie’s conclusion is that this country is an oppressive, white supremacist patriarchy and that it will be “one battle after another” because the revolutionaries are incompetent and the white devils control everything.
Sinners is not about hating white people. It’s not about lecturing. It’s not even about racism specifically. That is merely the backdrop. It is dealing with heavy questions like was the blues, Rock n’ Roll, hip hop, and other films that came from African culture the “Devil’s Music” as Christians (black and white) believed back then? No, contends Coogler. It comes from somewhere else. It comes from roots and history and storytelling and, yes, talent handed down from the generations.
Wokeness takes our history and applies it to the modern day to say that we should all be put into categories, and that those categories should decide our worth. White men are at the bottom, the most marginalized at the very top (trans people of color, for instance). Whiteness, they say, lives inside all of us like a deep, dark evil, and once you make a joke on X or you use the wrong word or you say the wrong thing, they call you out and hiss RACIST.
Sinners is successful only because people liked the movie. They loved the movie, in fact.
It isn’t quite Top Gun Maverick, but it’s not that far off and all the more impressive because it’s not a sequel.
It is the highest-grossing film of the 10 domestically, and second internationally.
- Sinners $280 domestic/$369 worldwide
- F1 $189 domestic/$639 worldwide
- Marty Supreme $86 domestic / $105 worldwide (so far)
- One Battle After Another $71 domestic/$206 worldwide
- Hamnet $17 domestic / $42 worldwide (so far)
- Bugonia $17 domestic / $41 worldwide
- Sentimental Value $4 million domestic / $16 worldwide
- The Secret Agent – $3 million domestic / $6 worldwide
- Frankenstein N/A
- Train Dreams N/A
And here are the budgets for these movies:
- One Battle After Another $130-175 million
- F1 $135
- Frankenstein $120 million
- Sinners — $90 million
- Marty Supreme — $70 million
- Bugonia — $45-$50 million
- Hamnet — $35 million
- Train Dreams — $10 million
- Sentimental Value — $7.8. million
- The Secret Agent — $5 million
Sinners is also the most successful of the films Warner Bros. put out that are original:
Sinners: $279 million
F1 $189 million
Weapons $151 million
One Battle $72 million
I mean, what’s the guy gotta do?
Yes, it’s embarrassing that no black director has won in 98 years of Oscar history. It’s embarrassing that two films by black directors have won Best Picture without their directors winning. It’s embarrassing that the designated slot for Screenplay is always given out instead: American Fiction, BlackKklansman, Get Out, etc.
But none of those reasons is why Sinners should win. There has to be a measure of success beyond the bubble of Hollywood, and that success must be how well the movie played in theaters, how much it moved the needle culturally, and how beloved it was by both audiences and critics. Sinners, more than any other film in the lineup, meets that high bar and even surpasses it.
No matter what happens, Sinners pays the price. People complain about the 16 nominations, but it was a weak year, and it landed in all of the categories. If it wins, they’ll be bitching about it on the Left and the Right forever. I don’t even know if it will win. We’ll have to see. But I do one thing: it deserves to win and not because of “wokeness” but because it deserves it.
