Welcome to Statue Season! Each week leading up to the 98th Academy Awards ceremony, we’ll be checking in on the closest races, the winningest narratives, and the plain old movie magic that will decide who’s taking home the gold on March 15. This week, we’re exploring whether a film earning the most nominations at an Oscar ceremony is a low-key curse.
Sinners doesn’t need to win any Oscars to make history—it already did that last week when it earned a record 16 Academy Awards nominations, beating the previous record by two nods. In a way, its legacy is already cemented; it will always come up in awards conversations as one of the most prolific Oscar films ever—and it achieved that status as a uniquely original box office hit in an atypical awards genre.
Still, for director Ryan Coogler and Co., I’m sure the hardware would be nice. And with those 16 nominations, they’re bound to get it—but how many statuettes, exactly? After it earned a record-setting number of nods, you’d be inclined to assume Sinners is the front-runner to take home the most statuettes from the Academy Awards ceremony in March, including Best Picture. And yet, betting markets are unmoved by Sinners’ achievement: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another remains the Best Picture favorite.
Maybe this doesn’t come as a surprise to you. Over the past week, social media has been littered with backlash to Sinners’ accolades—claiming the film is an “overrated” “popcorn” film undeserving of the prestige treatment. Whether you agree with those criticisms or not, it’s not surprising that filmgoers are instinctively ready to denigrate a film that broke a record that places it in the same conversation as All About Eve. In fact, as recent Oscar races have shown, piling on the accolades often makes the audience’s critical eye even harsher. Which raises the question: Is being the most nominated film at the Oscars a blessing or something closer to a vampiric curse?
We can look to Academy Awards history to guide us, with the caveat that, again, no other film has ever gotten 16 nominations before—we’re already in brand-new territory. While it’s no surprise that films that have been the most nominated at their respective ceremonies have performed well, they’re certainly not batting a thousand when it comes to Best Picture. Out of 97 ceremonies, 61 Best Picture winners were the most nominated (or tied for the most nominated) film in their particular year. That means that a little over a third of the recipients of the Academy’s top prize might have looked like underdogs on the day that nominations were announced.
But as the Oscars have changed over the years, there have been stretches when they were more predictable (meaning, they were more often awarding Best Picture to their most nominated film) and when they were more scattered (i.e., there was a split between the most nominated film and the eventual Best Picture winner). The Oscars’ early days fell more often in the latter camp. It Happened One Night, for instance, became the first film to sweep the big five categories at the seventh Oscars, in 1935—winning Best Picture along with awards for its lead actor and actress, director, and screenplay—but the most nominated film that night was the technically innovative One Night of Love. It wasn’t until the ’60s that the Academy started regularly handing out the most nominations to the films that would go on to win Best Picture: The Apartment, West Side Story, and Lawrence of Arabia are all among the decade’s classics that earned the most overall nods as well as the top award. From 1983 to 2001 (a.k.a. the peak Oscar-bait era), there was only one ceremony in which the most nominated film didn’t go on to win Best Picture: 1992, when 10-time nominee Bugsy lost Best Picture to The Silence of the Lambs. (I’d be fascinated to know if anyone was upset by that decision.)
The 2000s and 2010s proved to be more unpredictable. There was the infamous 2006 ceremony, when eight-time nominee Brokeback Mountain lost Best Picture at the buzzer to Crash (which went on to become known as one of the worst winners of the trophy ever). Then came 2012, when The Artist beat 11-time nominee Hugo in one of the weakest Best Picture races in recent memory. In 2017, there was the whole Moonlight–La La Land kerfuffle—but that Best Picture result would have been shocking even if the announcement had gone smoothly. La La Land tied for the most Oscar nominations for a single film at the time, with 14 nods, but ended up losing the top prize to Moonlight. The former is still the most nominated film in Oscar history to not win Best Picture.
Maybe something got released into the air when those envelopes got switched, because ever since La La Land’s loss (and Moonlight’s win), the Best Picture races have somehow become even more chaotic. Only twice in the 2020s has the most nominated film won Best Picture: Everything Everywhere All at Once and Oppenheimer. In 2020, Joker became the most nominated comic book film ever (remember when Joker was a major Oscar player?), leading the 92nd Academy Awards with 11 nods. It ultimately danced its way to a mere two trophies, losing Best Picture to Parasite. Last year’s nominations leader—which, I’m sorry to remind you, was Emilia Pérez—had the fewest wins of any movie in Academy Awards history to garner at least 13 nods, taking home just two trophies.
Like Sinners, those nomination leaders were also subject to criticism in the run-up to their Oscar nights. La La Land became a lightning rod because of its whitewashing of jazz music (and because its lead actors weren’t, to put it nicely, the most convincing singers or dancers). Joker aroused a whole moral panic ahead of its release when some feared the film would incite real-world violence. (No violent incidents related to Joker were reported.) In the end, the movie ended up being … pretty boring! And as a result, some deemed it undeserving of the Oscars’ highest honor. And I don’t need to remind you of what happened with Emilia Pérez, but its plethora of nominations certainly motivated critics to hold a magnifying glass to the content of the film (and its star’s social media presence).
By comparison, Sinners’ backlash feels pretty muted. That’s probably because it’s a better film than Emilia Pérez, Joker, or even La La Land. Its criticism has mostly come from random posters online calling it overhyped or, worse, twisting themselves in knots trying to discredit the film’s themes. I don’t think that particular discourse in a vacuum has genuine sway over the results of the Oscars. But the impulse to disparage a film with a number of nominations that immediately places it in the upper echelon of Oscar movies is a real one. Recently, it’s clearly been quite common for the Academy’s voters to turn away from the movie they gave the most nods to by the time the awards arrive.
That still doesn’t fully explain why Sinners has yet to become the Best Picture favorite. For one, being the most nominated film at the Oscars doesn’t automatically catapult you to the front of the Best Picture pack. Sure, if your film got a lot of nominations, there are probably at least some voters considering it for the top prize—but not necessarily the most voters. Joker, for example, was never really a serious threat to win Best Picture—those who consistently tuned in for Bong Joon-ho’s speeches on the awards circuit that year will remember that the race was largely between Parasite and 1917. It’s not exactly groundbreaking to point this out, but sometimes having the most nominations just means that a film qualifies for a lot of categories. Last year’s Best Picture, Anora, didn’t compete for a number of awards Emilia Pérez was nominated for, like Best International Feature or Best Original Song. Movies that receive a lot of nominations are often bigger productions that perform well in the technical and craft categories—like La La Land or Titanic—but that doesn’t mean smaller-scale films can’t be in serious contention for Best Picture. A streaming movie that got only three nominations won Best Picture just four years ago, for crying out loud!
Furthermore, Sinners is up against stiff competition. One Battle has the second-most nominations at this year’s Oscars, with 13—it’s one of only 17 films ever to get that many nominations. Breaking records or not, you can’t count that out, especially after PTA’s film has collected one Best Picture–equivalent award after another on the campaign trail so far while Sinners has yet to land a major one. While One Battle has garnered its own backlash online as viewers dissect the film’s politics, its bona fides make it a formidable opponent against even a historic nominee. Like Sinners, One Battle was also a critical darling that made a sizable dent at the box office—though there was some hand-wringing over how big that dent actually was—and it was made by a long-snubbed, beloved filmmaker who’s due for his coronation. That’s a really strong narrative that any film would have trouble surpassing—even the most nominated one in Oscar history.
That said, the Best Picture race is far from over, and it wouldn’t be unheard of for the front-runner at this stage of the game to start losing steam. (This time last year, The Brutalist was the favorite to win the trophy.) Even if Sinners doesn’t come away with the top prize, it’s bound to take a bite out of a number of the 15 other categories it’s nominated in: Expect it to take home a handful of those technical and craft statuettes—including, perhaps, the inaugural Best Casting trophy, for which it’s currently the favorite. It also earned nominations in three out of four acting categories—including Best Supporting Actor, for which Delroy Lindo received a uniquely surprising nomination—and though it isn’t currently the front-runner in any of them, I could see the potential for an upset in at least one acting category if the Sinners campaign surges further. (Wunmi Mosaku currently has the best odds of the three Sinners actors nominated.) Then there’s Best Director, and although a split between Best Picture and Best Director doesn’t happen often (the last time was in 2022, when CODA director Sian Heder wasn’t even nominated), the fact that both Sinners and One Battle have built such imposing Oscar campaigns could signal it might happen this year. Either way, Sinners vs. One Battle is one of the most compelling Best Picture duels in years—it’s fitting that it’s already going down in historic fashion.
Stock Watch
To paraphrase one of cinema’s great stockbrokers: Nobody knows if an Oscar stock is going to go up, down, sideways, or in circles. In this section, we’ll evaluate who’s on the up-and-up and whose momentum is sputtering out as the competition across categories heats up.
Stock up: AMC’s Best Picture Showcase will feature Netflix’s nominees for the first time—could that boost Frankenstein’s and Train Dreams’ campaigns? Sentimental Value star Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas notched a Best Supporting Actress nod from the BAFTAs over her costar Elle Fanning, perhaps indicating the former’s edge in the Oscar race. Sinners’ Wunmi Mosaku’s awards surge continued with a BAFTA nod over Weapons’ Amy Madigan, a front-runner for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
Stock down: The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura missed out on a BAFTA Best Actor nomination, while his four other Oscar opponents all got recognized. KPop Demon Hunters was also snubbed by the BAFTAs—were the Brits immune to HUNTR/X fever? Meanwhile, Diane Warren put out a call for Paul Thomas Anderson or Christopher Nolan to let her write a song for their next movie—so far, no takers.
