Ryan Coogler Calls Sinners’ Record 16 Oscar Nominations “Pretty Crazy”
Now that this year’s Oscars have been announced, Ryan Coogler’s much-acclaimed period-piece vampire feature, “Sinners,” is officially a record-breaker for the ages. In the annals of the Academy Awards, which are getting close to a century old, three previous films – “All About Eve” (1950), “Titanic” (1997), and “La La Land” (2016) – have received 14 nominations each. “Sinners,” which belongs to the famously Oscar-snubbed horror genre, has received 16 nominations out of the now-24 categories. Coogler’s own response to this great development is one of amazement and humility.
Coogler on This Oscar Record
In a January 22 interview with Deadline, Coogler professed to having no grandiose predictions about how his fifth film would be received when he and his extremely talented cast and crew (the people honored by the nominations include three actors, the costume designer, the composer, and the editor, to name just a few) were making it. “For me,” he said, “people just showing up to the movies and having a good time, that would’ve been enough. That is worth all the effort.” Thus, he found it both “pretty crazy” and “so rewarding” that the Academy “would consider the craft and the achievements that went into it individually.”
It also was not lost on him that “Sinners” belongs to the horror genre, which the Academy Awards are notorious for slighting. At the same time, the film contains such a unique hodgepodge of elements – being at once a blues musical, a vampire flick, and a period drama concerned with racism in the Jim Crow South – that it really flouts confinement to a single genre.
For this reason, Coogler said that “I haven’t had a chance to think about it on the genre thought,” and that the genre defiance of “Sinners” made him all the more grateful “that everybody said yes to this movie… because I knew that the movie on the surface could be read as very strange. And I say that in the best of ways, because I also really love strange movies. Those are the movies that I always admired. And I always admired the bravery of artists that were able to make movies that were kind of undefinable when it came to genre… and movies that went there in any particular way.”
How Big Will Horror’s Eighth (Tied) Best-Picture Nominee Win?
Prior to “Sinners,” only seven horror movies have ever been nominated for Best Picture, with only one of those (1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs”) winning. Last year, “Nosferatu” and “The Substance” got a fair amount of Oscar attention, but only the latter (the seventh horror Best Picture nominee) managed to snag a single win (for Best Makeup and Hairstyling).
Interestingly, “Sinners” is not the only horror film to be in the running for this year’s Best Picture: it shares its status as the eighth nominee of this genre with Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” the latest reimagining of one of literature’s oldest horror stories. Del Toro’s film, which is also a Gothic period piece (set in 19th-century Europe), has been nominated in many more of the same categories as “Sinners,” including for its production design, costume design, makeup/hairstyling, score, and one supporting actor (Delroy Lindo in “Sinners,” Jacob Elordi in “Frankenstein”).
Neither Coogler nor del Toro is a director starved for prior Oscar recognition – the former has been nominated for all but one of his previous four films (two of which won at least one award), while del Toro took home a Best Picture statuette for his 2017 dark fantasy romance “The Shape of Water.” It’s also easy to pinpoint certain categories in which “Sinners” and “Frankenstein” will likely go toe-to-toe – most notably, in production design and cinematography, for which both films have received spectacular acclaim.
Landmark Nominations Making History
In the case of “Sinners,” the sheer landmark number of nominations makes it almost impossible to imagine that it will go home empty-handed – the only thing crazier than a movie with 16 nominations is one that doesn’t score a single win in any category. Nonetheless, it’s not unheard of for double-digit Oscar nominees to win no such awards at all; “The Color Purple” (1985) and two different Martin Scorsese movies serve as rare examples of this. But even in the very unlikely event that “Sinners” becomes another entry in this ledger, the fact that it’s already made Oscar history appears to be more than enough of a reward for its tremendously ambitious yet humble-spirited director.
