Embarrassing stats for the mediocre Sinners.
The 16 Oscar nominations for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners should not surprise anyone who noticed the decline of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). The Academy’s downhill trajectory gained speed when its membership rules changed in 2018. Lousy movies have predominated ever since.
The Academy’s emphasis on race and gender politics began under the tenure of Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the Academy’s first African-American president. (The media cheered that Boone Isaacs “made history” as only the third female Academy president following actress Bette Davis and screenwriter Fay Kanin, although the real distinction was her publicist background, which made her the first non-artist to be president of the Academy.) Boone Isaacs pushed diversity initiatives that removed the organization’s membership cap — a response to the post-Obama mania for identity-based representation.
This year’s rout by Sinners makes racial patronization an unavoidable factor. It results from the Academy’s radical “Inclusion Standards” that were established in 2020. These prescribed eligibility by requiring that each production submitted for Academy consideration provide proof of race and gender employment quotas. This changed film-production standards not just in Hollywood but among filmmakers around the world who hungered for recognition from the Academy, widely considered the ultimate commercial guarantee.
But not everyone is buying that flimflam. There’s been a social media uproar about the Academy’s veneration of Sinners — a genocidal fantasy that plays on black masochism and white liberal guilt — an excessive glorification that says more about Hollywood political correctness than the film’s artistic merit.
Those 16 nominations reflect lingering embarrassment of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag campaign that shamed the Academy back in 2015, prompting its implementation of social justice reforms.
Since that #OscarsSoWhite humiliation, the Academy that once took pride in being above the horror and sci-fi movie genres began to embrace films that used the horror and sci-fi genre formula to promote liberal social justice and diversity campaigns — 12 Years a Slave, Get Out, Green Book, Black Panther.
The 16 nominations for Sinners surpass previous record-breakers All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land, which each received 14 nominations. That statistic does not indicate equivalent quality; in the four-decade gap between All About Eve and Titanic, both popular in their day, we see the lowering of Hollywood standards from the 1950s to the 1990s to the millennium, when the appearance of newness counts more than substance.
Millennial Hollywood deludes itself in relation to its political gratification. It takes 16 nominations out of the Academy’s 24 categories to compensate for Hollywood’s guilt about systemic racism.
Here’s why each of the 16 nominations for Sinners is fraudulent. As in an ACLU lawsuit, these may be the worst claims — cardinal sins — that the Academy has made against cinematic quality:
Best Film: Liberals permit themselves to think that Coogler’s vampire/Ku Klux Klan analogy is not just an action-horror mash-up but a significant, if clumsy, reflection of African-American experience.
Best Director: Even Francis Coppola, director of the failed Cotton Club, naïvely praised Coogler’s fantasy as a culturally authentic vision.
Best Original Screenplay: Coogler wrote a genre hodgepodge (borrowing heavily from Robert Rodriguez and Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn and Spielberg’s The Color Purple) as if his imitation was original. Coogler rejects black gospel for genre-movie trash.
Best Cinematography: Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the Filipino-African-American female techie composed underlit, grimy (inept?) imagery.
Best Costume Design: Ruth E. Carter, a Spike Lee veteran, simply switched Michael B. Jordan’s headgear to differentiate his two too-similar twin roles.
Best Film Editing: It’s basic cut-and-paste, but the nomination is always a sign that the Academy generally approves of the film regardless of its craftsmanship, or in this case that laughable machine-gun montage.
Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Years-late acknowledgment of Afro coiffure as if that’s an industry advance.
Best Music (Original Score): Ludwig Goransson’s forgettable ersatz score is consistent with Coogler’s ignorance of blues style.
Best Original Song: “I Lied to You,” by Göransson and Raphael Saadiq, follows Coogler’s phony blues theme, keeping the tradition of the most meaningless Oscar category.
Best Casting: The Academy’s newest, least justifiable category, introduced for Hollywood’s least imaginative era.
Best Production Design: This basic aspect of production honors a popular movie, even if its visual setting (formerly called art direction) is unconvincing.
Best Sound: Shrieks and moans and suggestive blood-sucking — aural design worthy of Troma but with a bigger budget.
Best Visual Effects: The most important craft for falsifying Southern history. Everything’s faked, from vampires to race war.
Best Actor: Michael B. Jordan’s master class in playing two characters, Smoke and Stack, indistinguishably.
Best Supporting Actress: Wunmi Mosaku’s first impression as Annie, a formidable hoodoo woman, is eventually reduced to sexual chattel and then cannon fodder. Hattie McDaniel weeps.
Best Supporting Actor: Delroy Lindo’s Delta Slim fakes a fake bluesman to satisfy Hollywood’s taste for cultural stereotypes.
It does not overstate the impact of the AMPAS’ “Inclusion Standards” to liken their importance to Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which specifically detailed ethnic and gender quotas and criteria. The Oscars are the means of enforced behavior, regulating film-production practices, then swaying public opinion about the quality of films that are aesthetically inferior but make sentimental liberals feel good. That the global film community is complying with the Academy’s pressure leads to the misperception that somehow the mediocre Sinners is worthy of extreme, disproportionate Oscar attention.
The record-setting 16 will seem automatically important to naïve Oscar-watchers who accept Sinners’ ultimate refutation of Christian morality — the narrative arc goes from church to juke joint to charnel house — as the corrupt industry norm.
