Oscars 2026: Sinners vs. One Battle After Another has devolved into a fraught racial controversy.

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

It was a great year for movies. But the discourse surrounding Sinners, One Battle After Another, and other Oscar contenders is starting to get unhinged.

By Nadira Goffe

From the end of every November until the Academy Awards in late February or early March, Hollywood's awards season inevitably gets swallowed by a few tried-and-true cycles of discourse and controversy. There's always some late-stage hate train mounted against the most hyped film of the year, some well-trod debate about whether a beloved actor is overrated, and heated discomfort voiced by marginalized groups that find themselves once again pushed to the sidelines. But this season's debate has somehow managed to hit on all three at once, snowballing into what has to be the most contentious online fight surrounding movies and the Oscars race in a good while.

The film at the center of the maelstrom is Ryan Coogler's Sinners, a heterodox horror flick starring Michael B. Jordan as two twins battling a horde of vampires and white supremacists in 1930s-era Mississippi. The movie, which was written, directed, and co-produced by Coogler, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, was a hit, earning the love of both viewers and critics following its spring release. But as awards season has ramped up, fans have constantly set Sinners against its competitors, including Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another—which is expected to pick up a swath of Oscar nominations in a number of prominent categories, including Best Picture, as they're announced on Thursday—Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme, and even Netflix's smash KPop Demon Hunters. The accusations leveled by Sinners' most vocal proponents have run the gamut: Timothee Chalamet winning a Critics' Choice Award for Best Actor over Jordan was the result of racism; OBAA taking home more Golden Globes than Sinners was the result of racism (and was even more egregious because OBAA is in itself racist); the KPop Demon Hunters track "Golden" nabbing a Globe for Best Original Song over Sinners' "I Lied to You" was also racist because K-pop borrows from Black culture, and yet a Black film lost to the movie. The outcome is one of the most racially fraught awards seasons in recent memory—and, to be completely honest, it's starting to get a little unhinged.

Sinners is a great movie. It's incredibly inspired, original, ambitious, and filled to the brim with talent both established and new to our screens. Coogler pulled off something amazing with his deeply Black film, and he did it in the face of industry naysayers. (Remember when major publications like Variety and the New York Times, for some reason, took the time to highlight how Sinners had not yet achieved profitability not even a week into its release, even though it was widely considered a feat to have such a good box-office opening for an original genre Black film?) Between that early treatment and the omission of Sinners from some critics' year-end "Best Movies of 2025" lists in historicallywhite publications, it was no wonder that fans—and Black fans in particular—had a chip on their shoulder about this beautiful miracle of a movie that exceeded every expectation, even the seemingly unfair ones, placed upon it.

But now, in the thick of awards season, that chip has become a blunt object to whack at anybody who doesn't agree that Sinners should win every single award it's been nominated for (which is a lot!). Every winner that has beat out Sinners for a major award has been found to be at fault, resulting in criticisms that range from totally reasonable to totally unfounded. The first big controversy bubbled up around Chalamet's Critics' Choice Best Actor win, an honor that, according to Sinners fans on TikTok, wasn't simply unfair or wrong but undoubtedly racist, despite there also being a long list of highly plausible nonracial reasons for Chalamet to prevail over Jordan, from his hardcore campaign for Marty Supreme to the industry's love of biopics and indifference toward fun genre flicks. Contrary to online fans' apparent misunderstanding of the word snub, Sinners was not snubbed; the film won big at the CCAs—Best Young Actor, Best Casting, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Score—in a mix of major and technical awards. That streak of wins didn't extend to the Golden Globes, where, despite being nominated for seven awards, Sinners took home only Best Score, which was very upsettingly awarded during a commercial break, as well as Cinematic and Box Office Achievement, a newer award meant to bestow acknowledgment of commercial success rather than artistic achievement. One Battle After Another, considered a front-runner of this awards season, ended up nabbing most of the bigger prizes.

Unsurprisingly, the next big wave of controversy followed the Globes, with online critics and Sinners fans coming for OBAA on social mediain the wake of its Globes domination. Much of the denunciation of the film—a black comedy and action/thriller about an ex-revolutionary who must revert to his old insurgent ways when he is separated from his daughter as they're both hunted by a corrupt white supremacist military official—crossed into outright charges of racism and bias, with OBAA being accused of perpetuating negative portrayals of both Black women and left-wing revolutionaries. On X, posts accusing Anderson of fetishizing Black women—mainly Teyana Taylor's character, Perfidia Beverly Hills, whom some call "disgusting" and a painful "stereotype"—gained traction and have been viewed millions of times. So, too, have tweets taking issue with the minor character played by the rapper Junglepussy, who retained her stage name for the film at her own request. Some of the strongest censures of the film have been launched by Briahna Joy Gray, a political commentator and former comms head for Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, who asserts that OBAA is "mocking" to revolutionaries and written by a white man whose inspiration likely boils down to cringeworthy experiencesraising his mixed-race children. Following the Globes, the Root, a Black publication, published a piece positing that OBAA is"one of the most racially problematic mainstream movies Hollywood has produced in recent memory because the entire story is essentially about a hyper-sexualized Black woman who can't get enough of white d*ck." Many of these accusations aren't just bad faith, seemingly ignoring the other two hours of the film—one of the most criticized lines delivered by Perfidia, "This pussy don't pop for you," is straight from a Junglepussy song, not something Anderson dreamed up out of nowhere to have a Black woman say—but also just plain offensive, like reducing a complex Black female character who, yes, has consensual sex with her white partner but is also coerced into sexual relations with a fetishizing white supremacist, to a "Black woman who can't get enough of white d*ck."

Yes, the academy, and Hollywood writ large, has a deep history of institutional racism and has remained disproportionately white. Sinners has faced an uphill battle for legitimacy, as would any unapologetically Black project made by a Black filmmaker. But that doesn't mean that every time Sinners loses an award, that decision is inherently and definitively racist. It doesn't mean that every complicated depiction of a Black character that prompts discomfort or is not strictly positive representation is racist. Yes, there's a lot of Perfidia's story in OBAA that is left unstated and either alluded to or assumed. We are allowed to disagree about and critique art, and we should! But loving Sinners and supporting Coogler doesn't mean having to behave like a Marvel stan defending Black Panther's right to exist. Fans have put so much on Sinners that it's almost become a moral failing to enjoy the movies it's up against. That's not how we foster constructive discussions about representation in art. That's not a burden that a single movie can or should bear.

At the end of the day, there are many reasons why Sinners might get nominated but lose out on awards. After all, horror is a genre that has long been ignored by awards bodies, regardless of race. And plenty of other films have launched pretty ferocious campaigns in pursuit of those little golden men. That Sinners, as a genre film,is up there in conversation with all the other, more conventional prestige players is an achievement worthy of praise in itself. Coogler made something so undeniable the boring academy voters have no choice but to consider a campy, musical, vampiric racial allegory as one of the best of the year. If nothing else, we've at least come a long way since Green Book.