The 2025 horror film Sinners just made Oscars history after earning a record-breaking 16 nominations.
The film, directed by Ryan Coogler, is about Black residents in 1932 Mississippi battling white vampires.
For a movie that already sparked heated reactions upon release, the Academy Awards announcement ensured one thing: the arguments were never really over.
16 Oscar nominations for Sinners
The 98th Academy Awards released the Oscars nomination list on Thursday, and the films that dominated have something in common. In addition to Sinners' 16, Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another earned 13 nominations.
The nominations for the movie in which Michael B. Jordan lights up the KKK include:
- Best Picture
- Best Director
- Best Actor
- Best Supporting Actor
- Best Supporting Actress
- Best Original Screenplay
- Best Casting
- Best Film Editing
- Best Costume Design
And so on.
The previous record was 14 nominations, shared by three films, the most recent being Damien Chazelle's 2016 film La La Land. Double star Jordan had a hard time expressing his feelings around that level of recognition.
"It’s really a testament to the film as a whole and all the pieces involved and the people that went to go see this movie and watched this film," he told the Hollywood Reporter.
"For all of these pieces to be singled out and acknowledged and honored with the nomination. It’s something that’s really hard to put into words right now."
Sinners gained massive critical acclaim after its release in April 2025, with a 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and an A from CinemaScore. However, certain loud voices came out with strong opinions against the film, leading to heated online debates, with some feeling that those who were not the target audience missed the point—intentionally or not.
Critics, fans, and film Twitter weigh in
The record-breaking 2026 Oscar nominations list brought the discourse back from the dead. You can pretty much guess the profile details of any X user based on their opinion on the matter.
"Sinners as a fun, rare, big-budget, non-IP popcorn film: hell yeah," said pop culture writer Evan Rytlewski. "Sinners as one of the defining prestige films of the century: I dunno guys."
"Hip hop guy" Jay Smooth had some thoughts on that.
"Some of these tweets about how Sinners is just a 'fun popcorn movie' with nothing deeper going on remind me of the story Billie Holiday told, about a white woman at one of her shows saying: 'why don't you sing that one sexy song, you know, the one about the fruit!'" he wrote.
Fashion reporter Joe Bernstein, meanwhile, gave the film a much lower grade than average.
"The frustrating thing about Sinners is Coogler did all the hard stuff well," he opined. "He gorgeously evoked a fascinating time and place and set up truly compelling characters. And then for some reason he subjected them all to a C+ horror film set in a single room."
X users like @sinist3rgore were more direct with their thoughts on those panning Sinners, quoting, "'sinners doesn’t deserve 16 nominations it wasn’t even that good'" with a gif from the film of Jordan saying, "Y'all Klan?"
Meanwhile, conservative Blaze Media contributor Jason Whitlock had a predictable take.
"I'm just seeing Sinners received 16 Oscar nominations. One of the worst movies I've ever seen. Unreal."
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