Sinners went ahead and made another record last month, earning a whopping 16 Oscar nominations. The previous record was 14, shared by All About Eve (mother), Titanic, and La La Land. (For those who care about the stats, All About Eve and La La Land both won 6, while Titanic won 11.) If you care about awards, and if you care about Sinners, this was thrilling news, especially since people felt Sinners had been snubbed along the awards circuit. The thrill wore off for some of these same people almost instantly, though; within minutes of the announcement, I saw people theorizing that Sinners was nominated just to pacify the fans, and would end Oscar night empty-handed. One of those people was a friend of mine, who said it would be “the Beyoncé-fication of the Oscars.”

Naturally, this set off alarm bells in my head. I remain exhausted by the Beyhive’s whole deal, and bringing a Beyhive-level “analysis” to an Oscar race only exhausts me further. Because now you’re talking about something I know a lot about.

People are often surprised when I say that I don’t really watch awards shows. I get the surprise! I participate in Vulture’s Movies Fantasy League, I host an Oscars pool every year, and I say things like “Ethan’s only doing this because he’s gunning for an Oscar nom this year.”1 The prognosticating and fashion of awards season really is a lot of fun for me.

Still, the Oscar race being one of my high-interest objects is mostly separate from how I feel about the movies.2 Art is entirely subjective, so fitting it into a “winners and losers” framework does not work, like, at all. If you look at all of the Best Picture winners of a given decade, you’re not looking at a canon of the most culturally impactful or beloved movies of the era. You’re just looking at the movies that campaigned successfully. There are outliers, naturally—Titanic was such a dominant force in the culture that the Best Picture win is too small to capture it. But, on the flip side: does anyone besides me still remember The Artist at all, let alone fondly?

Point is, I’m very clear that the actual awards confer nothing meaningful, so I’m into Oscar campaigns for the love of the game. It’s getting harder to love the game, though, with so many amateurs bringing their sports fan energy into it.

The main characters of this year’s race are Sinners and One Battle After Another. Sinners, despite having more nominations and the bigger box office number, is the underdog here. It’s a horror movie, which the Academy famously disdains; and it’s a Black story by Black people, which the Academy famously ignores. Which means that OBAA, hilariously, represents the evil empire. The Yankees, the Pats, Manchester United, etc. I say “hilariously” because (1) it’s a really weird movie, and those only sporadically do well with the Academy; and (2) it’s a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, and his movies never win Best Picture. Sure, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, but I think he’s approaching Meryl Streep territory, in that people assume he and his movies have won a lot more Oscars than they actually have.3 Add to this potent mix that people have absolutely lost their minds over Teyana Taylor’s character—many of them without even seeing the movie!—and the narratives were set. It’s at the point where if Sinners wins fewer than all 16 awards, I fear its fans will still feel snubbed.

Moonlight and La La Land filled these roles about a decade ago, and that fit was a bit more natural. Moonlight was a legitimate underdog, an independent movie about a queer Black man with a lot of unknown Black actors that pulled in $66 million. La La Land was the surprise juggernaut, earning over $450 million and starring more famous white actors playing out a straight romance/love letter to classic Hollywood musicals. And since both of these movies hit theatres in late 2016, they got laden with a lot of undue political baggage. La La Land came to represent obliviously harmful white shenanigans, especially coming on the heels of the 2015 #OscarsSoWhite trend. Moonlight came to represent all our collective hopes for Black creativity, and Black voices in general, to be taken seriously. Hating La La Land on Moonlight’s behalf became a (totally inadequate) substitute for legitimate political activism. Pop culture fandom became a substitute for politics.

A similar thing happened for white feminists and Barbie a few years ago. Even Hillary Clinton took to social media to commiserate with Barbie for not receiving enough Oscar nominations. America Ferrera’s nomination for the movie barely registered; it was all anger about Ryan Gosling getting more accolades than Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig. Every time this happens, it’s a warped version of “linked fates,” the idea that our collective fate hangs in the balance whenever a movie that resonates with our community enters the Oscar conversation.

And now it’s happening again, with Trump back in the White House on “Oops, All Fascism!” mode and all of us feeling even more powerless and voiceless than we did on the last go-round. With fewer ways to express our real political voice, it’s even more appealing to use pop culture fandom as a facsimile of a political voice. Certain publications’ unwillingness to give Sinners enough credit feels like an even more vivid example of an industry- and society-wide unwillingness to take Black culture seriously. A movie that could read (superficially) as lionizing a white male savior (wrong) and demonizing Black female radicals (also wrong) feels like a bigger slap in the face. And calling these things out is comforting, especially if you do it online and get the dopamine-charging support from people who are also engaging as superficially as they possibly can.

Hell, Sinners losing every nomination would probably still feel validating, because you’ll be able to do some collective mourning of something that has zero stakes. It’s all so much easier than risking anything real in the real world, and so much gentler than mourning the very real and hideous things that happen every day in our name.

But flattening everything into fandom, and then having that fandom replace genuine thought, feeling, and engagement, is very fucking dangerous. (And is the real Beyoncé-fication, by the way!) It’s also no fucking fun, especially with so many people bragging about how incurious and stubborn they are.

Like, if you opened yourself up to more than one movie a year, you’d be pleasantly surprised that Sinners is getting as much acclaim as it is, given that it’s a horror movie. You’d know that Michael B. Jordan isn’t the only Black actor to play dual roles in a horror movie (the entire main cast of Us; Eddie Murphy in Norbit). You’d be excited, perhaps, at the possibility of Sinners becoming the new Silence of the Lambs—a horror movie that cleans up at the Oscars, and then that’s it for the genre for like 30 years. There’d be room for joy and variety and newness in your experience of this whole race. And perhaps there’d be room, too, for you to reckon with some other ways to express your political voice than to conflate it with a pop culture preference.

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