Actor Awards Analysis: Sinners Makes a Stand, But Will It Carry Over to the Oscars?

For months, One Battle After Another was winning everything, including the top prizes at the Critics Choice Awards on Jan. 4, Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 11, Directors Guild Awards on Feb. 7, BAFTA Awards on Feb. 22 and Producers Guild Awards on Saturday. But at the Actor Awards (formerly the SAG Awards) on Sunday — the first day of March, and smack dab in the middle of the weeklong final round of Oscars voting — the other big Warner Bros. contender, Sinners, showed major signs of life.

Indeed, Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster genre film walked away with the prize for best cast — vanquishing not only One Battle but also Hamnet, Marty Supreme and Frankenstein— and, in the night’s biggest surprise, best actor for Michael B. Jordan, calling into question the conventional wisdom about not only the best picture Oscar race, but also the long-presumed frontrunner status of Marty Supreme’s Timothée Chalamet in the best actor Oscar race (which was also dinged at last weekend’s BAFTA Awards).

Before going any further, it must be acknowledged that the Actor Awards and the Oscars are voted on by very different bodies. Actor Award winners are chosen by the roughly 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA, the world’s largest union of actors, who are overwhelmingly based in the U.S., while Oscar winners are chosen by the roughly 11,000 members of the Academy, which is composed of people from every sector of the film industry, 20 percent of whom are based outside of the U.S.

And if one wants proof that the two groups aren’t always on the same page, look no further than the discrepancy between the nominations for this year’s Actor Awards and this year’s Oscars: SAG-AFTRA’s nominating committee did not include a single non-English-language performance among its 20 finalists, while the members of the Academy’s actors branch, who solely determine the acting Oscar nominees, included four non-English-language performances among its 20.

When it comes to their top prizes —best cast and best picture, respectively —SAG-AFTRA tends to recognize more diverse and populist work than the Academy. For instance, SAG-AFTRA honored The Help, Hidden Figures and Black Panther with its best cast prize, but none went on to win best picture at the Oscars. Indeed, over the 31 years in which both prizes have been given out, their winners overlapped on just 15 occasions.

However, almost every odds-defying best picture Oscar winner in that timespan first won the best cast SAG Award. See: 1998’s Shakespeare in Love, 2005’s Crash, 2015’s Spotlight, 2019’s Parasite and 2021’s CODA.

It’s hard to classify Sinners as an “underdog” for the best picture Oscar when it received 16 nominations, breaking the all-time record by two, and yet, at this point, it is one. The best arguments for Sinners over One Battle are that Sinners might play better on the preferential ballot through which the Academy chooses its winners, and that One Battle could be vulnerable to the same thing that may well have felled past best picture frontrunners like 2016’s La La Land and 2019’s 1917: some people get bored of the same film winning everything over the course of a very long awards season. We will see.

SAG-AFTRA has a much better track record of “predicting” the Academy’s picks in the four individual acting races — although Chalamet presents an interesting case study. Last year he won the best actor Actor Award for his performance in A Complete Unknown and then lost the best actor Oscar to The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody. This year he lost the best actor SAG Award for his performance in Marty Supreme but might well still win the best actor Oscar.

What is going on? From what I’ve been able to gather, many find Marty Mauser, Chalamet’s character in Marty Supreme, repellent; some have been put off by Chalamet’s swagger on the awards circuit; and others feel that, at just 30, he will have many other chances in the future, which is not a given for some of his competitors. Plus, his movie is not clicking overall in the way that Sinners or One Battle are, and it looks unlikely to win an Oscar in any other category. (Only five of this century’s best actor Oscar winners won without their film also winning any other Oscar: Denzel Washington for 2001’s Training Day, Philip Seymour Hoffman for 2005’s Capote, Forest Whitaker for 2006’s The Last King of Scotland, Eddie Redmaybe for 2014’s The Theory of Everything and Will Smith for 2021’s King Richard.)

Jordan, meanwhile, also gives a tour de force performance (playing twins), and in a movie that has much broader support; has been understated on the campaign trail; and garnered sympathy and admiration following the terribly unfortunate incident at last weekend’s BAFTA Awards. Perhaps most crucially, Jordan’s Actor Award win comes in the middle of Oscar voting, demonstrating to Academy members that a vote for him could actually make a difference. (Had Chalamet won the Actor Award, many would have seen a Chalamet best actor Oscar win as a fait accompli, much like everyone, following the best actress Actor Award win for Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley, sees a best actress Oscar win for her as a done deal.)

Which brings us to the supporting acting categories.

Even with all the Sinners love, the best supporting actress Actor Award went not to Sinners’ Wunmi Mosaku (the BAFTA Award winner), nor to One Battle’s Teyana Taylor (the Golden Globe Award winner), but to Weapons’ Amy Madigan (the Critics Choice Award winner). The case against Madigan repeating at the Oscars is that she’s her Oscar category’s only nominee who does not hail from a film that is also nominated for the best picture Oscar. I think that’s a legitimate concern, given the amount of Oscars coattail voting that has been happening in recent years.

But at the same time, Madigan has literally been acting —and been an Oscar-nominated actress —for longer than any of her fellow nominees have been alive, she has worked with everyone, and she is well-liked. Mosaku and Taylor, like Sentimental Value’s Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas if not Elle Fanning, are relatively new to the scene and lack Madigan’s name I.D. It will be a nailbiter of a race, but at this point I think the edge has to go to the veteran.

Meanwhile, the best supporting actor Actor Award, like last weekend’s corresponding BAFTA Award, went to One Battle’s Sean Penn, despite the fact that he has done virtually no campaigning and was, in both contests, competing against a field that included his costar Benicio Del Toro. Penn, who already has two Oscars to his name (one of which currently resides in Ukraine on loan to Volodymyr Zelenskyy), is an all-time great who would be as worthy as anyone of having three acting Oscars (a tally bettered by no male and equaled among males by only Walter Brennan, Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis).

But I wouldn’t count out two septuagenarian veterans who were not nominated for the best supporting actor Actor Award but are nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar, having never previously been nominated for any Oscar: Sentimental Value’s Stellan Skarsgård, who could benefit from the Academy’s international vote, and Sinners’ Delroy Lindo, who could catch a wave with his film. Their showdown with Penn will put to the test just how much shaking hands and kissing babies does —or doesn’t —matter in the modern era.