'Sinners' Has Already Won
We are the Oscars, baby. And the Oscars could never be us.
Paid subscribers! Below is a video of a Q&A with Ryan Coogler, Autumn Durald Arkpaw, Ruth E. Carter and Hannah Beachler from a private screening of Sinners I’ve been saving just for you!
Tonight, ‘Sinners’ is nominated for a record-breaking 16 Oscars by the film Academy considered in this town to be the most significant possible acknowledgement of artist mastery. In its 98th awards ceremony, this Academy could make history by honoring Black genius—literally, they haven’t done it significantly or with any regularity in 98 years, but maybe tonight will be the night! Maybe the brilliance is so undeniable that a 98-year-old historically white supremacist institution will have to concede the truth!
My film-loving Black people, I don’t want you to prepare your hearts “for the worst” if the cast and crew don’t win what they should; I want us to divest our hearts entirely.
When we watched this film multiple times in the theater, Sinners won.
When we sought out stories from our elders after watching it, Sinners won.
When we read books on Hoodoo and reached for our ancestors, Sinners won.
When we shared this film in community and still talk and write and think about it a year after its release, Sinners won.
We are the Oscars, baby. And the Oscars could never be us.
Writer-director Ryan Coogler and producers Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian, best actors Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku, Miles Caton, Jayme Lawson, Saul Williams and Buddy Guy, cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, musician Raphael Saadiq and composer Ludwig Goranson, costumer (and Hamptonian!) Ruth E. Carter, production designer (and leo!) Hannah Beachler, editor Michael P. Shawver have already won.
They shifted the culture. They opened a portal. They unlocked creativity and put a balm on a festering wound in Black history. They reaffirmed for us that the answers to the fight against white supremacy’s death culture are connection and community with each other and our ancestors. In a time of rising fascism and imperialist world war, these tools will see us through as they saw our ancestors through and will ensure our collective survival. That’s a level of power that these institutions could only dream of experiencing and therefore fear. Sinners and its cast and crew have been subjected to humiliations meant to undercut them personally and the film as a whole because of that fear. And we undercut the power of the film and Black genius when we couch it in terms of what white supremacist validation trophies they won or should have won. We concede that they are the arbiters of what’s good and right and true. And that has never been the case.
The Academy is an old and dying institution. It has proven itself again and again to be both irrelevant to Black talent and incapable of awarding it as it deserves. Like Remmick, it seeks to suck the soul and reap the benefits of Black artistry with little but admittance into an eternal death cult in exchange. There’s a reason the biggest onstage performance tonight will be in celebration of Sinners, with Misty Copeland coming out of hip replacement surgery to dance in what will surely be a live recreation of the surreal montage from the film, with Saadiq, Caton, Goranson, Guy and Lawson all performing. They need the fans of Sinners to watch live like all of these awards shows need Black talent and Black audiences to hold onto relevance. But the clips will be online eventually. Imagine if we divested.
Imagine if we did not concede our cultural power to those who never meant to honor it. They risk their crumbling credibility by not rewarding what is handedly and by miles the best film of the year, if not decades. Let them crumble. I want for these individual filmmakers whatever they want for themselves; they deserve to be honored and celebrated. I don’t begrudge them attending the Oscars, even knowing that the Academy might play in their faces. But Sinners is already bigger than the program. With more than 200 awards collected in the past year, these filmmakers don’t need the Oscars.
Though it’s not a flawless film (of course, as always, I have notes!) it’s still perfect. I have talked and written about and watched this specific film more than any film ever because it is unlike any film ever. Who knows when we’re going to get something that moves the earth like this again! So, I’m going to celebrate it all week over on my YouTube channel with video breakdowns of some of my favorite themes.
But this is bigger than Sinners too. This is about culture and how we decolonize our culture by reclaiming our power over it. That is the message of the film! To not be co-opted by benevolent oppressors who want to steal control over our artistry under the guise of “appreciation.” How do we re-root ourselves? How do we reclaim and recontextualize ourselves so that we are not constantly viewing ourselves, our capabilities and our worth through a white supremacist capitalist cis-hetero patriarchal lens? How do we stop contorting ourselves and our creative expression to fit within a box built specifically to exclude us? This is what it means to divest.
And with the energy we’ve saved, we can reinvest in community. The cast and crew of Sinners are well-rewarded; who are the artists in your community that you can uplift and support? What’s playing in your local theater that you can patronize? If you’re the artist, who around you can you collaborate with to produce a joint vision? Filmmaker Richie Reseda dropped brilliant gems on how to build community-owned film productions on the BGW podcast Another Possible World, if you need inspiration.
I hope the cast and crew of Sinners hear exactly what Viola Davis told Michael B. Jordan when he won Best Actor at the SAG Awards: “You are shining, Herald Loomis!” Shining like new money! More than that, I hope we all find our shine in our own light, in our own gaze, in our own culture. That’s that new-money shine. That’s how we win too.
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
Enjoyed this piece? Tip your writer!
Paid subscribers can watch the Q&A with Ryan Coolger below: