Did the Golden Globes Hurt Sinners’ Oscar Chances?

The morning after the 83rd annual Golden Globes Awards has set a media narrative that could define the next month of awards shows: this is the year of One Battle After Another or Hamnet, at least per an organization that gave both the title “Best Picture,” with the dubious claim of Paul Thomas Anderson’s tense, action-packed thriller being a “musical or comedy.”

Indeed, the big winners of the night on the film side would appear to be those movies, with OBAA picking up the Globe for Best Picture in a Musical or Comedy, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress for Teyana Taylor. Meanwhile Chloé Zhao’s elegiac portrait of art being used to express and process grief, Hamnet, did quite well in its own right, nabbing Best Picture, Drama, as well as Best Actress in a Drama for Jessie Buckley.

Yet this might have seemed strange to viewers cheering the most popular (or at least highest-earning) nominee for either Best Picture race: Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. The Southern-flavored horror flick, which mixes the fictional terrors of vampires with the real ones of segregated, Jim Crow era Mississippi, has been championed by many as the classic of 2025, as well as a perceived frontrunner for Best Picture and a host of other awards. However, at least at the Golden Globes, where Coogler was nominated for several awards—including Best Director and Screenplay—as well as Michael B. Jordan for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, the only prizes Sinners picked up were Best Original Score for Ludwig Goransson’s work, and the faintly condescending “Cinematic and Box Office Achievement” prize.

The latter appears to be an award designed to boost viewership and often given to movies apparently considered too basic for many voters’ tastes in other categories, with the previous two winners of this newly added trophy being Barbie and Wicked, movies that also were otherwise shut out by the Globes, save for a Best Original Song win for Billie Eilish’s contributions to Barbie.

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.

So many of the “biggest” prizes will be a battle for Sinners, although even there we see light in the tunnel. For while the Academy remains recalcitrant toward horror in acting and directing categories, the organization is much more open to awarding the genre Oscars for screenwriting. And unlike the Globes, the Academy gives out two screenplays Oscars, “Original” and “Adapted.” See, for example, when Jordan Peele picked up the Original Screenplay Oscar for Get Out in the same year that The Shape of Water won Best Picture and Director.

When you also factor in competitive races in categories like Best Cinematography, Score, Production Design, and Sound, we’d be shocked if Sinners walks away empty handed come Oscar night, and we doubt the Globes will have much influence one way or another on this fact. But by coincidence or otherwise, we have to admit that this looks like One Battle After Another’s big year with Hamnet as the dark horse.