Given how popular movies like Barbie and Wicked went on to not win any of the above-the-line awards in their respective years, it is probably giving fans of Sinners’ mournful guitar riffs one more reason to sing the blues. But the good news is that, unlike Barbie and Wicked, Sinners is still perceived in the industry as a serious Best Picture contender. And when it comes to predicting that race (nd many others), the Globes are historically unreliable.
For proof please consider that in the last 10 years, the Globes and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ tastes for “best picture” have aligned only four out of 10 times. Despite the Globes essentially having two Best Picture winners (which doubles their chances of “predicting” the Oscars correctly), far more often we wind up with years like 2022 where The Power of the Dog was awarded Best Drama and West Side Story given Best Musical or Comedy (which is a rare good use of that category’s title), but the Oscars went on to shockingly select CODA for Best Picture. Similarly in the last year before the pandemic, the Globes appeared to narrow the race down to 1917 (Drama) and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (Comedy), but missed the boat entirely on Parasite.
Admittedly many of those years occurred during the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s infamously checkered history as the arbiters of who receives a golden earth bauble, but even since the organization was reformed as the Golden Globes Foundation in 2023—and to be clear their nomination choices have been much more impressive since the pivot—they still selected The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez as the best films of 2024, and gave the future Oscar darling Anora exactly zero Globes despite five nominations.
All of which is to say that the Globes are a tenuous bellwether for predicting Oscars, and it seems unlikely that members of the Academy will let the Globes’ wins dictate whether they vote for Sinners or not in any major category.
With that said, we unfortunately suspect that Coogler’s fabulous horror movie still has an uphill battle ahead of it because it’s a horror movie. A fabulous, beautifully made horror movie. Alas, despite Academy membership growing by hundreds of younger voices in the last decade, somehow the voting pool of the most prestigious Hollywood award remains relatively allergic to giving top prizes to anything deemed too scary or lurid. There is exactly one (1) exception to this rule when it comes to the highest prize, with The Silence of the Lambs nabbing a stunning Best Picture win despite opening a virtual calendar year before the 1992 Academy Awards. Thirty-four years on though, this remains a bizarre outlier. To date the Best Picture race has seen only six other horror movies nominated: The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), The Sixth Sense (1999), Black Swan (2010), Get Out (2017), and The Substance (2024).
Sinners will absolutely be nominated for Best Picture as will, we would hope, Coogler for Director and Jordan for Best Actor, but the Academy remains frustratingly reticent about giving horror too much recognition. Just last year, The Substance‘s Demi Moore was perceived as the frontrunner for Best Actress, a prize she picked up at varying previous ceremonies, including the Critics Choice Awards, the SAG Awards, and even the Globes (in the as ever random “Musical or Comedy” subsection). But to many’s shock, the also deserving Mikey Madison picked up the Oscar for the delightful Anora—a movie that we might add is actually a comedy.
