Ryan Coogler‘s Sinners earned $370 million at the box office. It holds a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. It broke the all-time record for Oscar nominations with 16. Michael B. Jordan won the Actor Award (formerly SAG) for Best Actor. The film swept the ensemble prize. Tonight, it could leave the Dolby Theatre as the most decorated movie in Academy history.
By every available metric, Sinners is one of the most successful films of the decade. It does not need rescuing. It does not need a defense squad. And yet, for the past four months, a vocal slice of its fanbase has treated every awards ceremony like an act of war — and every loss like evidence of a conspiracy.
The Scoreboard Nobody Asked For
It started at the Critics’ Choice Awards in January. Timothée Chalamet won Best Actor for Marty Supreme over Jordan, and within hours, the word “racism” was trending on TikTok and Threads. Not “disagreement.” Not “upset.” Racism — stated as settled fact, with no room for the possibility that Chalamet’s performance might have simply earned enough votes from critics who watch movies for a living.
@calabasaswings Okay #criticschoiceawards #timothéechalamet ♬ original sound – Calabasaswings
Then the Golden Globes happened. One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s political thriller, took home most of the major prizes. Sinners won Best Score and the box office achievement award. Online, the reaction wasn’t disappointment. It was prosecution. Fans accused the Golden Globes of racial bias. They accused One Battle After Another itself of being racist — a film about a man fighting white supremacists, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor.
When Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters beat Sinners for Best Original Song, the charge expanded further: K-pop borrows from Black culture, the argument went, so a Black film losing to that movie was itself a form of cultural theft. Every ceremony became a courtroom. Every result that didn’t favor Sinners became a verdict.
When Loyalty Becomes a Weapon
None of this happens in a vacuum. Hollywood has a documented history of sidelining Black filmmakers and Black stories at awards time. The Academy spent decades ignoring performances that should have been honored. Coogler made a $370 million R-rated original horror film with a predominantly Black cast, and some of the industry’s most prominent publications didn’t even include it on their year-end best-of lists. Variety left it off. So did Rolling Stone. That kind of omission stings, and it’s fair to say the frustration didn’t come from nowhere.
The Critics’ Choice Awards 2026 sinners, why they do not like Sinners movie: It depicts white people as blood sucking vampires and KKK members pic.twitter.com/nKtJRR4wfu
— kevin blue (@kevinblue345) January 6, 2026
But there’s a difference between calling out institutional bias and declaring that every single loss is proof of a racial plot. One is accountability. The other is fandom operating like a stan army — and the effect has been to flatten a real conversation into a binary where you either agree that Sinners deserves everything or you’re complicit in racism.
That framing hasn’t just been unfair to the other films in the race. It’s been unfair to Sinners. A movie this ambitious, this layered, this commercially dominant doesn’t need to be reduced to a loyalty test. Coogler himself seemed to understand this when he posted an open letter to fans after the film’s release, thanking them and saying he felt a deep responsibility to entertain and move people through cinema. He never framed the film as a cause. The discourse did that on its own.
The Real Cost
Here’s what the toxicity actually risks. Oscar voters are human beings who read the internet. When the online conversation around a film becomes sufficiently hostile — when enjoying a different movie is recast as an act of disloyalty — some voters push back. Not out of malice, but out of exhaustion. The same pattern played out with Chalamet’s aggressive campaigning for Marty Supreme, which multiple pundits have said wore thin with voters. Intensity backfires. It always has.
And the irony cuts deep. Sinners is a film about what happens when communities are manipulated into turning on each other instead of looking at the forces above them. The juke joint in the movie is a space where people come together across difference. The online discourse around the film has become the opposite — a space where difference isn’t tolerated and disagreement is treated as betrayal.
Tonight Will Speak for Itself
The 98th Academy Awards air at 7 PM ET on ABC. Sinners is in the running for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and a stack of craft awards. It might sweep. It might not. Either way, the film’s legacy was secured the moment it crossed $370 million and broke the nominations record. No envelope opened tonight can take that away.
But if it loses Best Picture to One Battle After Another, the response is predictable. The word racism will trend before the acceptance speech is finished. And somewhere in the noise, the actual achievement of what Coogler and Jordan built — a genre-defying, record-setting, culturally seismic film that didn’t need anyone’s permission to succeed — will get lost in a fight the movie never asked its fans to pick.
Sinners deserves better than a fanbase that treats its success as fragile. It isn’t. It never was.
