With a record-breaking 16 nominations, more than any film in Academy Awards history, Sinners seemed poised to dominate. In the end, it won four. This would be a career-defining night for most films, but for Sinners, it feels both like a triumph and something slightly more complicated.

I’ll be honest, I’m biased. I wanted Sinners to win everything. Part of that is because I simply love the film, but part of it is also because it represents something slightly different from the kinds of performances and films the Oscars usually reward. There’s a long history of awarding bodies gravitating toward a very specific type of intense, macho, method-actor transformation. Don’t get me wrong, those performances can be great. But sometimes it feels like awards season becomes a competition for who can suffer the most dramatically on screen. What I admire about Sinners, and what its Oscar wins ultimately point toward, is how collective its ambition feels. Rather than one performance dominating the film, it’s the world that Ryan Coogler and his collaborators build together.

“Ludwig Göransson’s Oscar-winning score pulses underneath the entire film”

Coogler directing his first fully original feature in years already felt exciting enough, but the cast and crew he assembled make it clear just how ambitious the project really is. Michael B. Jordan expertly plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack, returning to their hometown to open a juke joint in the deep South. Around him is an absurdly stacked ensemble of Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo, and Hailee Steinfeld, all bringing their all and keeping the world of the film alive.

That same sense of care runs through the technical work, which is where the Academy Awards really embraced the film. Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography is stunning. Shot in IMAX, seeing it in a cinema is genuinely transformative. The camera moves with an almost hypnotic fluidity, especially during the ‘I Lied to You’ sequence, where the juke joint erupts into a celebration of musical history. Ludwig Göransson’s Oscar-winning score pulses underneath the entire film, immersing you completely in its world. That’s why it’s difficult not to feel slightly disappointed that ‘I Lied to You’ didn’t win Best Original Song, as a piece of music that so completely captures the heart of the film.

The sequence itself moves through different cultural moments from traditional African drumming, to Chinese dance traditions, to early blues, to hip hop beatboxing, even Hendrix-style electric guitar. It’s chaotic in the best possible way, creating a visual and musical collage that feels like history unfolding in real time. That recognition feels especially significant given that Arkapaw’s win marked a historic first. In her acceptance speech, she used the moment to reflect on the growing recognition of women in cinematography, something that makes the Oscar feel meaningful beyond the film itself.

At the centre of all of this is Michael B. Jordan, whose Oscar-winning performance feels quietly significant. Playing two characters in the same film is already technically difficult, but what makes his performance so impressive is how clearly defined both Smoke and Stack feel. They are distinct, shaped by the same world but responding to it in completely different ways. That kind of performance could easily become a gimmick. Instead, it becomes one of the film’s emotional anchors. It also sits within a longer legacy of Black male actors navigating Hollywood, from Sidney Poitier to Denzel Washington to Will Smith. What Jordan does here feels like an expansion of that lineage. The fact that the Oscars recognised this kind of performance feels important.

“It’s one of the most thematically ambitious films of the year”

Beyond all the thematic discussion, Sinners is one of the most ambitious films of the year as a result of Ryan Coogler’s innovative writing. He blends Southern Gothic horror with historical storytelling, introducing supernatural elements that make the film so interesting. The vampire mythology draws on Irish folklore while sitting alongside the legacy of Christianity in the American South, a religion that was often forced onto enslaved Africans while their own spiritual traditions were violently stripped away. Wunmi Mosaku’s character in particular embodies that tension between inherited belief systems and lost cultural histories.

The result is a film that uses horror as a way of exploring the historical trauma embedded in the setting. This is why I struggle with the argument that Sinners somehow isn’t “serious” enough for awards recognition. If anything, it’s one of the most thematically ambitious films of the year. Yes, the film is dense. But it never feels rushed. Coogler allows each idea space to breathe, and the different themes all orbit around the same central questions about identity, community, and cultural memory. The sheer scale of the film is part of what makes it so impressive.

Sinners didn’t take Best Picture or Best Director, and it’s hard not to wish it had, particularly when it lost to One Battle After Another, whose success feels tied as much to the sense that Paul Thomas Anderson was long overdue Academy recognition as to the film itself. But Sinners’ four wins and 16 nominations, say a lot about how widely it was appreciated across the Academy. It’s rare for a film to feel this expansive and still connect across so many categories. The sheer scale of sinners in terms of music, movement, and important cultural ideas all working together reminds you what cinema can look and feel like when it’s given space to go big. And if for some reason you haven’t seen it yet, you probably should.