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 assessing Sinners’ surge at the Actor Awards on Sunday night and what it means for the Oscars.
Viola Davis was ready for the moment. Poised to announce the Actor Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, she read the card and immediately processed that she was about to relay perhaps the biggest awards season upset thus far. Needless to say, she delivered:
That’s right: At Sunday night’s Actor Awards (formerly the Screen Actors Guild Awards), Sinners’ Michael B. Jordan took home Best Actor in his first major awards season win. I mean, my God, the electricity in that room when his name was announced! Even though the result was unexpected, it’s clear that Jordan has a groundswell of support behind his campaign. And so does Sinners. Sunday served as a much-needed boost to the film’s Oscar run after it nabbed the ceremony’s top prize, Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, along with Jordan’s win.
These victories came after the vampire flick had lost every previous Best Picture precursor under the sun (moon?) to One Battle After Another—including, crucially, the Producers Guild Award for Best Theatrical Motion Picture, the most accurate Best Picture predictor on the awards circuit, which went to the producers of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film on Saturday. Sinners entered Sunday looking lifeless, but the Actor Awards just injected new blood into its Oscar campaign, two weeks before the big night.
Let’s start with Jordan. The major implication from his win is that Marty Supreme’s Timothée Chalamet, who has long been the favorite for the Best Actor Oscar, suddenly looks like he’s on shakier ground. Chalamet’s snub by the BAFTAs last week felt like a fluke because he was beaten out by Robert Aramayo for I Swear, which is not eligible for this year’s Oscars. But in conjunction with the Actor Award loss (and whatever Kevin O’Leary was doing on the red carpet), it really feels like Marty Supreme’s stock has dipped significantly. Is Timmy fully cooked? (And, perhaps, getting the Leo treatment?) FanDuel still has him at –140 odds, and since he has a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Award under his belt, I can’t count him out completely. But the momentum has certainly shifted.
But whom the momentum has shifted to remains murky. Jordan has placed himself firmly in the race with the Actor Award win—after being all but written off, he’s now catapulted to the consensus second-best odds for the Oscar. But he’s still facing an uphill battle to the statuette: No one has ever won Best Actor equipped with only a SAG Award as their sole major precursor win. Remember when our pal Timmy did nab the SAG Award in an upset victory over The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody last year? Brody, who won every other televised precursor, went on to win the Oscar even though Chalamet threw a wrench into the race at the last minute. Even with Jordan’s late surge, it would be anomalous for him to take the trophy.
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If Chalamet is losing steam and Jordan is still a long shot, could someone else swoop in and win this thing? Maybe it’s due to the sheer strength of the slate, but this Best Actor–off is one of the most up-in-the-air Oscar races in recent memory. At various points of the campaign, there have been arguments for every single contender: One Battle’s Leonardo DiCaprio was an early favorite, and Blue Moon’s Ethan Hawke is a beloved actor who’s never won before, but I think the dark-horse candidate with the best chance to take home the hardware is The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura.
For one, he won’t be showing up to the Academy Awards empty-handed: He won the Golden Globe for Best Actor—Drama over Jordan back in January. And Jordan didn’t have to compete with Moura on Sunday; the Actor Awards, which have a history of ignoring international cinema, didn’t nominate The Secret Agent in any category. While the Screen Actors Guild is one of the largest voting bodies on the awards circuit (and has a lot of overlap with the Academy), the Oscars have been much more friendly to non-English-language fare in recent years. With the category tilting so significantly over the past 10 days, Moura might have an opening by Oscar night.
But Sinners also finally landed a hit against One Battle when it won the Actor Awards’ top prize on Sunday. After the PGA verdict seemingly decided the Oscar race for One Battle, Sinners needed that Best Cast victory to keep it in the Best Picture conversation, even as it enters Oscar night with a record 16 nominations. Then again, while the Best Cast trophy has long been viewed as SAG’s Best Picture equivalent, it’s not one of the most reliable Best Picture predictors. Last year, for instance, Best Cast went to Conclave after it ceded all of the other guild awards and the Critics' Choice Award for Best Picture to Anora; the latter ultimately won the Oscar. Plus, with the inaugural Best Casting award being handed out at this year’s Academy Awards, I suspect that the Actor Awards’ top prize will more often predict that honor rather than Best Picture. (While One Battle has maintained its lead in the Best Picture race, Sinners has long been the favorite for Best Casting.) All of this is to say: One Battle is still firmly in the lead for Best Picture.
But man, what a race, huh? Thirteen days away from the Academy Awards, we still have a ton of questions. And that’s exciting! But it also makes sense—Sinners and One Battle are two of the biggest and most loved films to go head-to-head at the Oscars in years. As a result, people feel passionate about these races! As a lover of cinema, I appreciate that. But as a lover of chaos, I might appreciate it even more.
Stock Watch
To paraphrase one of cinema’s great stockbrokers: Nobody knows whether 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: The Best Supporting Actress race took another turn on Sunday, as Weapons’ Amy Madigan walked away with the Actor Award. Meanwhile, One Battle’s Sean Penn bolstered his surging stock in the Best Supporting Actor race by pairing last week’s BAFTA with an Actor Award. On the Best Actress front, I haven’t mentioned Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley in this column for weeks, as her plethora of precursors has practically made her Oscar a guarantee. (They’ve also resulted in the only boring acting race—get with the program, Best Actress!)
Stock down: After losses to Madigan and Sinners’ Wunmi Mosaku, One Battle’s Teyana Taylor is slipping in the Best Supporting Actress race. Her costar Benicio del Toro has also lost any ground he had gained as an early favorite for Best Supporting Actor. Leonardo DiCaprio was not in attendance at the Actor Awards because he’s busy filming Martin Scorsese’s What Happens at Night in Europe—but that was a convenient excuse not to show face amid his dwindling chances for a second Oscar.
