Sinners Can Finally Break a Dumb 34-Year Streak After Making Oscars History

Sinners has already made history, but it might only just be getting started. After critical acclaim and commercial success, with 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and $368 million at the box office, Ryan Coogler’s period vampire flick is already a certified hit, but it’s just pulled off one of the most impressive feats yet: Sinners became the most nominated movie in Oscars history with a whopping 16 nominations, two more than the previous record (which was jointly-held by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land).

The movie, which had a budget of around $100 million, achieved the perfect blend of technical craft, storytelling, and performances that allowed it to dominate across the board, including nominations for Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan), a Best Director nod for Coogler, and, of course, Best Picture. The latter wasn’t a surprise, but is notable: Sinners is now only the eighth horror movie ever to be nominated for the biggest Academy Award of them all, as the table below outlines:

Oscars Year	Movie
1974	The Exorcist
1976	Jaws
1992	The Silence of the Lambs
2000	The Sixth Sense
2011	Black Swan
2018	Get Out
2025	The Substance
2026	Sinners

That achievement alone puts Sinners in rareified air, but it could go even further. Of those, only one horror movie has actually gone on to win Best Picture: The Silence of the Lambs, way back in 1992. Over thirty years later, could Sinners be about to change that?

Will Sinners Win Best Picture?

Sinners was already a strong contender, but its 16 nominations obviously push it to the very front of the pack. That kind of recognition is very difficult to overlook, showing just how popular it is with every branch of the Academy and making it a pretty easy vote in so many categories. It’s clearly a movie that they want to recognize, and with it being such a cultural moment, then it’s one they might not want to pass up on (not to mention, it is great).

In terms of Oscars history, it’s tempting to look at the previous record holders and how they fared: All About Eve and Titanic both won Best Picture, while La La Land lost out to Moonlight in one of the most shocking Academy Award moments of all time when it was wrongly announced as the winner. That puts the form guide in Sinners‘ favor, but it’s a very small sample size and more importantly, recency is important in looking at the Oscars, because it so often shifts in trends as its voter pool expands and diversifies (which it has a lot in the 2020s). Looking back at the nominee leaders from this decade, it’s a slightly different picture:

Oscars Year	Most Nominated Movie	Best Picture Winner
2020	Joker (11)	Parasite
2021	Mank (10)	Nomadland
2022	The Power of the Dog (12)	CODA
2023	Everything Everywhere All At Once (11)	Everything Everywhere All At Once
2024	Oppenheimer (13)	Oppenheimer
2025	Emilia Perez (13)	Anora

Only twice this decade has the most nominated movie gone on to take the Best Picture prize, but they’re also, perhaps, the two that are most similar to Sinners in nature: they were movies that became, to varying degrees, genuine events (the word-of-mouth sleeper sensation of EEAAO and the Barbenheimer phenomenon), which is true of Sinners. Joker and Emilia Perez were both marred by controversies that limited their chances, and the latter, along with Mank and Power, were all Netflix movies, which has yet to result in a Best Picture win.

Just a couple of months ago, One Battle After Another had seemed like the clear frontrunner, but this now very much seems like a two-horse race (and that movie’s 13 nominations isn’t exactly a bad haul). One key advantage for Sinners, though, is that it didn’t suffer any obvious snubs. OBAA missed out on Best Actress for Chase Infiniti, for example, while moving further down the race, Hamnet‘s Paul Mescal also missed out on the Best Supporting Actor nod, Guillermo del Toro didn’t get Best Director for Frankenstein, and so on. Sinners has the broadest love, which is a very good sign, and it feels like it has a realistic chance in the key categories that foretell Best Picture (such as Coogler for Original Screenplay).

It is still very early in awards season though, and momentum could still shift drastically with key bellwethers like the PGA Awards and Actor Awards (formerly SAG Awards) to come. Sinners did lose out to Hamnet for the Golden Globe for Best Drama, while One Battle won the Musical/Comedy prize, but that’s hardly a damning defeat. The Globes often does its own thing: even with two top prizes, the winner of either has lifted Best Picture just twice this decade (Nomadland and Oppenheimer). And it may actually be a bad sign for Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie: the winner of Musical/Comedy hasn’t won Best Picture since Green Book‘s upset in 2019.

It’ll be fascinating to see how this continues to develop across the season, and whether either of those movies can edge further ahead of the other, or even if another emerges from behind to take the lead (again, momentum and narratives are so often the key, and that will be ramping up as studios begin to make their pushes and there’ll inevitably be at least one controversy).

Right now, though, given it’s greater across-the-board popularity, I can see a world where Anderson takes Best Director, and Sinners takes Best Picture, finally giving horror a long overdue win. The Academy has wrongly overlooked the genre, and tellingly, Sinners feels a little similar to another horror, Get Out, in terms of its cultural significance (and, of the other nominated horrors since Silence of the Lambs, it’s the one that most obviously should have won). The Oscars erred by not giving that the top prize. Would they really consider repeating that? And would it be a mistake if so? We’ll find out in a couple of months.

Sinners is available to stream on HBO Max. The 98th Academy Awards will take place March 15th, 2026.

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