And then there were two—frontrunners.
Ryan Coogler'sSinnersis themost nominated(16) film in Oscar history.Paul Thomas Anderson'sOne Battle After Another, such are the Oscars-so-white ways of Hollywood, is still touted as the favorite for Best Picture.
Nonetheless,Sinnersshould win the Oscar for Best Picture. And the race shouldn't even be close.
Apologies for the ample spoilers ahead.
OBAA, a dark comedy and action thriller set in a fictional California town, begins with a focus on Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a member of a revolutionary group called the French 75, and his partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a Black woman. It opens with the group raiding an immigration detention center. In the process, Perfidia, who's characterized as domineering and insatiable in her sexual appetite, humiliates Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), strife that sets off Lockjaw's psychosexual obsession with her, desire replete with a tryst. Perfidia becomes pregnant, and Bob trades the life of a leftist revolutionary for fatherhood. In the film's long prologue, Perfidia abandons her new family, is caught, snitches on her comrades, and gets ghost.
The second half of the film picks up when their daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), is a teenager. Lockjaw, who's been offered the chance to join a cabal of powerful Christian nationalists, starts hunting Willa to test his paternity of her and the attendant risks to his dreams of leveled-up white supremacy.
Before the PTA acolytes blaspheme me a hater: Kudos for directing the performances of Deandre (Regina Hall), who along with Willa, are Black characters distant from satire. Kudos for Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who's a calming force on the film and funny without straining for laughs. Kudos to Penn for disappearing into the role of the racist officer, one conflicted with unforgettable idiosyncrasies. Kudos to the pulse-gunning action of the film's last third. Kudos to Anderson for dramatizing a secret society of prominent white men who echo the Epstein files.
Critics have hailedOBAAas a "deeply humanist story of rebellion." Proclaim "there is nothing trivial in [PTA's] portrait of shattered lives and relationships and of an American society shaken to its core." But I found those claims to be untrue. The film is undeserving of the Oscar for Best Picture, most of all because its portrayal of Black people is somewhere between insidiously problematic and flagrantly anti-Black.
The most glaring example is Perfidia (this ain't me knocking Taylor or her prodigious talent but a critique of the role), who's sexualized to the point that I wondered whether she should be read as satirical. While Black women, too, contain multitudes, her hypersexuality seems grounded in the stereotype of a promiscuous Black woman (never to be divorced from the virtuous white woman) and appears aimed at titillation rather than some other essential story function. Perfidia is also presented as a woman who's at least a second-generation revolutionary, and aren't revolutionaries people of principle? It was tough for me to buy that a legacy revolutionary would snitch with the quickness on her coconspirators, if at all. The "no snitching" dictum in Black culture is rooted in a legitimate mistrust of the justice system. That Perfidia and others in the group go from radicals to state informants in the time it takes a grenade to blow maligns the integrity of Black resistance.
Perfidia also abandons her infant—"You realize I put myself first, right?" she tells Bob on her way out—a decision I judged against the extensive discourse on a so-called crisis of broken Black families. Plus, Perfidia is the only member of the group who murders someone during their missions. And whom does she kill? A Black security guard.
The lone Black male member of the French 75 is Laredo (Wood Harris). Laredo has almost no lines, but Anderson saw fit to depict a moment in which he kisses Mae (Alana Haim) and says, "Regular working white girl. Now do your thing," before sending her off to a bank job. A cringe line that seems meant to reify the trite trope of Black men objectifying and coveting white women.
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The problematic portrayal of Blackness extends to Junglepussy (Shayna McHayle), who jumps on a bank teller's counter during that same lethal mission and declares her code name. While McHayle uses Junglepussy as her rap moniker, it's telling that Anderson chose not only to keep the name for her character but to have her trumpet it—and that her moniker is the lone one borrowed from real life. Not to mention that Bob, the man in an interracial relationship with a Black woman, is christened "Ghetto Pat," which is a hella curious handle, ain't it, given the long history of Black people being maligned as "ghetto"?
Deep into the action of the film, Sergio quips to Bob, "I've got a little Latino Harriet Tubman thing going on." What was the point of having Sergio, a Mexican man, turn one of Black history's most iconic figures into a punchline, when he could've mentioned someone like Manuel Luis del Fierro, the Mexican who protected an absconding slave from kidnappers in 1850?
OBAAportends itself a film about a government that has devolved into an authoritarian regime and its relentless persecution of immigrants, about humanity and the measures the people employ to fight oppression. But it's hollow on those subjects. Beyond showing Bob half-watchingThe Battle of Algiersat home, Anderson shortchanges the history of revolutionary social movements. Politics are treated with a flippancy that undermines the import of radical action and the people who dare it—the pure antithesis of the message we need now. How could it do anything but fall short of satirizing a regime that has proved near boundless in its violence and corruption and blatant bigotries, that treats contrition as anathema. And if satire ain't its aim, I can abide even less its antagonism toward my people, not to mention how it trivializes resistance. Plus, the film recapitulates Hollywood's familiar message: The battle for the fate of America, often synonymous with the fate of the world, is at base a battle between white men, struggles that evermore foreordain a great white savior.
Sinners, the genre-bending horror thriller set in Jim Crow–era Mississippi, centers Blackness. It begins with Sammie (Miles Caton), a young blues-loving sharecropper from Mississippi being recruited by his twin cousins Smoke and Stack (both Michael B. Jordan) to play their brand-new juke joint. On the juke joint's first night, white vampires surround it and prey on the patrons, setting off a battle for lives and souls.
Before anybody gets to accusing me of overt bias: Critics contend thatSinners's "moments of tragedy and violence are never dwelled upon properly." Argue it's a "messy picture that throws the kitchen sink at the genre, and yet, somehow, often misses." But I view the film as a triumph for its deliberative treatment of violence. For how it coheres into a story that explores African folklore and the healing power of culture; Black freedom and self-determination; love of family and community; with how it models resisting injustice.
WhileOBAApostures at it,Sinnersis radical in that there are no white saviors, in that Black people are not the stock sidekicks of courageous white people but heroes at the heart of the film. In fact most of its white characters, including all who first surround the juke joint to prey on its patrons, are depicted as hostile to the Black community (as well as the Asian characters and the mixed woman who are its denizens). Like the character of Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who, though she professes to love Stack, enters a veritable sanctuary for Black folks against warnings. Mary becomes the vampires' first victim, which is also to say their first coconspirator. Like the husband of married vampires who's a Klan member before he's bitten. Like the Klansman who sold the twins the barn that became their juke joint and returns the next day to slaughter all present. And yet, somehow,Sinnersis so soulful that the lead vampire, Remmick (Jack O'Connell), is imbued with more humanity than most of the Black characters inOBAA.
This article appeared in the April/May 2026 issue of Esquiresubscribe
Then there's the fact thatSinnersis just all-around extraordinary movie-making. There's the originality of Coogler's Oscar-nominated screenplay. There's Ludwig Göransson's superb Oscar-nominated score. There's the sublime one-shot scene in which Sammie's singing conjures a journey (in which African times past, present, and future exist all at once) that not only sets the stakes for the main characters but, as Coogler has explained, features "ancestor spirits from both the past and the future" of Black music: African drummers, an electric guitarist, a hip-hop DJ and dancer, even Chinese opera dancers. There's the indelible Oscar-nominated performance of Michael B. Jordan, a man who became two humans, each intimately connected and miraculously distinct.
Damn the naysayers, there is only one—worthiest.
Coogler'sBlack Panther, which was also nominated for Best Picture, became not just a blockbuster but a cultural touchstone. This time, without the help of a superhero franchise, one of Hollywood's finest auteurs has done it again: delivered a transcendent work of art that is at once ingenious, an astute story about America, and a paean to his people. Which is why, come Oscar Sunday, when an A-lister announces the last award, iswearfogod, there better be a whole lot of ecstatic Black folks bounding onto that stage.
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