The problematic history of the Oscars recognizing—or failing to recognize—Black people in the acting categories is a well-trod subject. We all heard about #OscarsSoWhite in 2015 and 2016, a two-year span in which all 40 acting nominees were white. We know the first Black winners in the major categories—Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Louis Gossett Jr., Halle Berry—partially because their wins have often been relegated to ubiquitous trivia questions. We know these things because these categories are populated by celebrities, so they enjoy the visibility and scrutiny that the other 20 Oscar categories often do not.
But there are still four Oscar categories that have never been won by a Black person: Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Visual Effects. (Note: This ignores the new Best Casting category, which hasn’t yet been won by anyone, and the Best International Film category, which is awarded to a film’s country rather than the people who made it.) Talking about race in this context is tricky, and correlation and causation can blur. Racism is often an explanation for the lack of Black winners, but it’s not necessarily a catchall one; every Oscar race exists in its own unique context, with its own unique competition. But a story emerges if you care to look for it.
For a century of film criticism and film journalism, we have been repeatedly told that the core of the cinematic art lies in three principal roles: directing, editing, and cinematography. These things represent the beating heart of cinema, we are told. It’s a statement of centrality, and once something can be seen as having a center, gatekeepers know where to devote their attention. Only two Black editors and three Black cinematographers have ever been nominated for Oscars (Autumn Durald Arkapaw, a current Best Cinematography nominee for “Sinners,” is the third). Why are there so few Black cinematographers and editors? That’s a story of gatekeeping.
For Black directors, the gatekeeping has shown obvious cracks, and more great Black filmmakers emerge every year. In the past decade, Black directors have helmed franchises, original blockbusters, and Best Picture winners, and Ryan Coogler is now the seventh Black filmmaker to get nominated for Best Director. That’s still a tiny number, but it’s more than have broken through in editing and cinematography combined. In fact, Best Director has arguably been the Oscar category with the most diverse crop of winners this century. In the last 20 years, three Best Director Oscars have been won by women, four by filmmakers from East Asia, and five by filmmakers from Latin America. But there still hasn’t been a single Black winner. No Black women have ever even been nominated.
So let’s talk about Ryan Coogler.
By now, you likely know that “Sinners” broke the all-time record for most Oscar nominations, receiving 16. It didn’t just break the record, it broke it by two. People will dismissively tell you this only happened because there’s a new Oscar category this year (Best Casting), but that’s an argument of selective history and convenient omission; there were two sound categories (Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Effects Editing) until they were merged together in 2020, so the three movies that were previously tied for the record of 14 Oscar nominations had just as many categories to compete in as “Sinners” did this year. Those three films—“All About Eve,” “Titanic,” and “La La Land”—all won the Oscar for Best Director, by the way.
When 1950’s “All About Eve” set the new record of 14 Oscar nominations, the record it broke was 1939’s “Gone with the Wind,” which received 13 nominations. It, too, won Best Director. Every film that has tied or broken the record for the most Oscar nominations since the start of World War II has won Best Director.
If “Sinners” wins Best Picture, which is entirely possible, it would be the third film by a Black director to do so, following “12 Years a Slave” and “Moonlight.” Neither of those films won Best Director, losing to “Gravity” and “La La Land,” respectively. In both cases, a clear narrative emerged as the explanation. The film that was more socially relevant and felt more important won Best Picture, while the genre film that was considered more of a technical accomplishment won Best Director.
That made enough sense in those specific cases. But in the case of this year’s showdown between “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another,” we’ve been hearing that the opposite could happen. If there’s a Best Picture/Director split this year, we’re told that Best Picture would more likely favor “Sinners” (because it’s the more populist film), while Best Director is more likely to go to Paul Thomas Anderson, for making the more impressive piece of art (or something).
Yes, we have only two previous examples of a film by a Black director winning Best Picture, and it’s slippery to draw clear conclusions from only two such cases. But if “Sinners” becomes the third film by a Black director to win Best Picture, and all three films also lose Best Director, that starts to tell an undeniable story. Two of those are cases where the more “important” film loses Best Director to the technically spectacular genre film, and the third is the technically spectacular genre film losing Best Director to the “important” film; in all three cases, the Black person loses.
That starts to look unmistakably like Black directors just aren’t allowed to win, regardless of the film they make or the competition they’re up against. And again, every other film that’s ever gotten 14 or more Oscar nominations has also won Best Director. If Ryan Coogler loses Best Director, he will be the first person to ever do so for a film that received 14 or more Oscar nominations.
Interestingly, none of these three Best Director races was perceived by awards pundits as especially competitive. Though there’s no way to know for sure (because Oscar voting totals are never revealed), the assembled assumptions of the punditry in 2014 were that Steve McQueen was never a serious threat to beat Alfonso Cuarón for Best Director, just as Barry Jenkins was never a serious threat to beat Damien Chazelle for Best Director in 2017, and just as Ryan Coogler is not being considered a serious threat to beat Paul Thomas Anderson for Best Director this year.
In all three cases, when a film by a Black director was considered a strong contender to win Best Picture, that Black director himself was not considered a strong contender for their own award. Again, we’re dealing with a small sample size, and it can be perilous to draw broad conclusions. But the commonality here speaks to a trend of viewing Black filmmakers as somehow a little bit less responsible for the greatness of their films than their white counterparts. When a white person directs a movie to a record nomination total, we all shout from the rooftops about the genius auteur who simply must be awarded. When a Black person directs a movie to a record nomination haul, it’s implicitly seen as more of a collective effort.
There will be an obvious temptation among some reading this (or not reading it, as the case may be) to reduce the argument to “Ryan Coogler should win Best Director because he’s Black.” But that’s not what I’m saying at all. In fact, I’m arguing the opposite. If Ryan Coogler doesn’t win Best Director, it will look suspiciously like the only reason is that he isn’t white.
Can you imagine a white guy writing and directing an original movie that finishes in the top ten of the domestic box office for the year and shatters the all-time record for most Oscar nominations, and then not winning Best Director? It’s almost inconceivable. We saw it happen when “La La Land” tied the record for nominations nine years ago. No one even entertained the idea that Damien Chazelle wouldn’t win Best Director. And that was for a movie that made half as much money and received two fewer nominations than “Sinners.”
16 nominations. Sometimes record numbers like that can feel too unwieldy, too meaningless in their sheer enormity. So it’s worth looking at that gargantuan number, 16, more closely. There are 24 Oscar categories, and “Sinners” was nominated in 16 of those 24. Of the eight categories, “Sinners” was not nominated in, six of them honor specific types of films that “Sinners” is not: Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary Feature, Best International Film, Best Animated Short, Best Documentary Short, and Best Live Action Short. “Sinners” was, obviously, not eligible for any of those six categories. There are also two screenplay categories, Original and Adapted. “Sinners” received a nomination for Best Original Screenplay and was therefore not eligible for Best Adapted Screenplay. Obviously.
Of the 17 categories that “Sinners” was even eligible to be honored in, the only one it didn’t receive a nomination for was Best Actress. And since the film arguably doesn’t have a female character in a lead role, you could argue—and I am—that “Sinners” is therefore the first movie to ever receive Oscar nominations in every single category it could have. That isn’t just an extraordinary achievement; it’s an achievement that, by definition, almost demands the Best Director award. If a film’s director is the person who oversees, coordinates, and harmonizes all of the various elements of filmmaking into a singular artistic vision, and then literally every single one of those elements receives an Oscar nomination, well, shouldn’t that be game over for the Best Director race? How could someone do a better job of directing than directing their collaborators to Oscar nominations in every single category possible?
I’ve seen several people argue that Paul Thomas Anderson should win Best Director because he made the year’s best film. (Full disclosure, I agree with the premise of that argument; “One Battle After Another” is my favorite film of 2025, and “Sinners” is my second favorite.) But that’s not an argument for why Paul Thomas Anderson should win Best Director, it’s an argument for why Best Director shouldn’t even exist as an Oscar category. And it’s fine to believe that.
Since the breakdown of the studio system and the end of the traditional producer model of Hollywood filmmaking, Best Picture and Best Director have become increasingly difficult to parse from one another. But if you do believe that Best Picture and Best Director can be evaluated separately—and that sometimes they ought to be awarded to separate movies—then you have to make a case for who should win Best Director based on something other than who made your favorite movie. I made the numerical and historical case for Coogler above. Now let’s look at the qualitative case.
“One Battle After Another” is my favorite film of 2025 because it has the most powerfully resonant story and dialogue of the year, the best characters of the year (most fully realized by the best acting of the year), and the best editing and score of the year. I am consequently rooting for “One Battle After Another” to win Oscars for those things. But “Sinners” is my second favorite film of the year, almost purely because of its directorial vision.
Though I have not read either film’s script, I would imagine reading the screenplay for “One Battle After Another” would pretty reasonably conjure the resulting film. It’s an astonishing work of screenwriting. With “Sinners,” on the other hand, I would not imagine that reading the screenplay would accurately conjure the resulting movie.
About an hour into “Sinners,” there is a two-and-a-half-minute tracking shot that weaves around the film’s main location and major characters, and incorporates the past, present, and future of Black music into a swirling whole. Does that description adequately explain the moment? Does that sentence do justice to what Ryan Coogler captured on screen in those 150 seconds? No. How could it? Can you imagine any words Ryan Coogler used to describe that sequence in the “Sinners” screenplay adequately conjuring what he ended up creating on screen?
Surely Coogler, who wrote “Sinners” himself, described the sequence better than I did, but the answer is still no. It’s the year’s ultimate “Behold! Cinema!” sequence. It must be seen—it must be experienced—to be believed. It’s a sequence of pure directorial vision that exists beyond the screenwriting process. It’s as perfectly visually conceived a sequence as any I have seen this decade. It’s a sequence that Best Director Oscars, as something altogether different from Best Picture Oscars, should exist to recognize.
But Ryan Coogler’s direction of “Sinners” did not end once the film was finished and the final cut was locked. Ryan Coogler also directed how it was exhibited and how audiences received it, and he directed the film’s arrival into the discourse. There’s an old saying in Hollywood that there are two steps to making a movie: making it and selling it. The selling of a movie tends to be something that directors—not always known for their charisma or star power—are less involved in. They’ll do Q&As at a few screenings, but leave the heavy promotional onus to marketing teams and stars doing the talk show rounds.
Not so for Ryan Coogler. With the now-legendary video in which he explains the different exhibition formats for watching “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler helped shepherd his film to audiences in a way I’ve never seen before. He directed the viewer experience, getting a generation of young filmgoers thinking about “perfs.” It can’t be overstated how extraordinary it is that a filmmaker got millions of people to watch a 10-minute explanatory video about aspect ratios and film stocks with excitement, and that those people were consequently inspired to leave their homes and pay to see the film in question in movie theaters.
Even the discourse around the film’s box office success was dictated on Ryan Coogler’s terms. The debate over the film’s profitability that took place in the industry trades was predicated on the unique ownership deal Coogler negotiated for “Sinners.” It was also tinged with racist undertones, as the film’s opening weekend haul was held to a different and frequently unreasonable standard. Both the tenor of the industry discourse around the film and the success of Coogler’s contract to control future ownership may have long-lasting implications for the way business in Hollywood is conducted and dissected.
Of course, as said above, every Oscar race exists in its own unique context, and a significant mitigating factor in Ryan Coogler’s candidacy is that Paul Thomas Anderson has somehow never won an Oscar, despite 14 career nominations (six for writing, four for directing, and four for producing). Anderson is, by any measure, one of the greatest filmmakers of the past 30 years, and he’s made half-a-dozen masterpieces (of which “One Battle After Another” is the latest). It’s absurd that he’s never won an Oscar, and this is a historical wrong that everyone seems justifiably invested in righting.
But here’s the thing: Once you elevate the discussion of an Oscar race beyond the specific films in contention, and you enter the territory of righting historical wrongs, you can’t only apply that reasoning to the white guy. Is it a historical embarrassment that Paul Thomas Anderson has never won an Oscar? Absolutely! Is it also a historical embarrassment that a Black person has never won Best Director? Emphatically yes! The temptation of so many people to rest their case on the former while completely ignoring the latter is the very definition of a double standard. And with the Oscars, as with so many other institutions, double standards always seem to work for white men while working against everyone else.
If we’re judging this year’s Best Director race based purely on the nominated films, I’ve made the case for why Ryan Coogler is the most deserving winner. And if we’re judging this year’s Best Director race by which egregious historical wrong simply must be righted, I’ve made the case for why Ryan Coogler is still the most deserving winner. And I have some great news for you: If Ryan Coogler wins Best Director and Paul Thomas Anderson wins Best Adapted Screenplay, we could have our cake and eat it too. Both historical wrongs would be redressed, and everyone wins.
There’s a question that often gets thrown around every year during awards season: “If not now, then when?” It’s typically asked in the service of honoring great careers that have heretofore been absent the all-important capstone of an Oscar.
But there’s no more deserving an occasion to ask that question than about the possibility of a Black filmmaker finally winning Best Director this year. An original, critically adored box office hit that out-grossed three different Marvel movies and then broke the all-time record for Oscar nominations—by two—is the perfect storm for someone to win Best Director. No one’s résumé will ever look better than that.
It’s the ultimate “If not now, then when?” case study. If a Black filmmaker still can’t win Best Director under these circumstances, and if “Sinners” becomes the third movie by a Black filmmaker to win Best Picture but not Best Director, then we can’t pretend the director’s Blackness isn’t the main reason why.