Sinners

Can Sinners pull off the biggest Oscars upset in recent times? That’s the question that many in Hollywood will be asking after Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending period-musical-horror picture has been nominated for a mighty 16 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor and Actress, and more. While it has been looking like a done deal that Paul Thomas Anderson’s Pynchon adaptation One Battle After Another will be sweeping to victory – and with a far from inconsiderable 13 nominations, it still could – the fact that Sinners is now the most nominated film of all time means that, on paper at least, it’s a serious challenger.

On paper, last weekend shouldn’t have been any great shakes for movie theater attendance. Audiences were offered, respectively, the second weekend of an African American-targeted horror picture; the fourth weekend of a video game spin-off; the re-release of the final George Lucas Star Wars picture, Revenge of the Sith, which has somehow turned 20 this year; and the major new release of the week, the sequel to the Ben Affleck vehicle The Accountant, which was only modestly successful upon its original release in 2016. None of these should have been particularly notable, and the weekend might have been expected to be another grim disappointment.  Well, this has not happened.