Commentary: Why Oscars' nominations don’t equal greatness
- Jennifer William
- Jan 26
- 3 min read
There’s something oddly predictable about the way Oscar nominations are discussed every year.
A film racks up a high number of nods and suddenly the conversation shifts from why this film worked to whether it now belongs in the pantheon of the greatest films of all time.
The 2026 nominations have followed that same pattern, with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners dominating the field with a record-breaking 16 nominations and quickly being framed as something more than an awards-season powerhouse.
But Oscar nominations aren’t a measure of immortality. They’re a measure of category eligibility.
Awards season rewards films that can compete across a wide range of categories and Sinners is almost engineered for that kind of breadth. It’s a stylized period piece packed with action, bold music cues, elaborate production design and a sprawling ensemble cast. Those qualities don’t just define the film’s aesthetic, they create opportunities for nominations.
Costumes, sound, editing, score, visual effects, supporting performances: Sinners has a presence nearly everywhere voters are allowed to look.
That doesn’t mean the recognition is unearned. When you go category by category, it’s genuinely difficult to point to many places where Sinners feels out of place. The craft is there, the ambition is obvious and the film executes its vision with confidence.
But that’s a very different claim than arguing it has already secured its place in cinematic history.
The contrast becomes clearer when looking at the other major nominees. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another earned 13 nominations. Its narrower focus and more restrained style leave it with fewer technical lanes to occupy, not because it’s lesser, but because it’s built differently.
Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme each earned nine nominations.
Sentimental Value broke through in both Best Picture and Best International Feature, with Trier also earning a Best Director nod, a notable achievement for a non-English-language film navigating an industry tilted toward American productions.
Marty Supreme, meanwhile, has been largely defined by Timothée Chalamet’s awards momentum, with its chaotic energy and abrasive protagonist dividing audiences more than uniting them.
Brazil’s The Secret Agent received four nominations, including Best Picture, Best International Feature and a Best Actor nod for Wagner Moura. Like Sentimental Value, its presence highlights how international films often need exceptional momentum just to occupy the same spaces more accessible domestic films enter by default.
There are countless extraordinary films, smaller, quieter, stranger ones, that never appear in double-digit nomination tallies simply because they don’t operate in that many categories.
A minimalist drama won’t contend for sound or production design. A tightly focused performance piece may only realistically show up in one acting race. That doesn’t make those films lesser; it just makes them less visible to an awards system built around scale.
Sinners benefits from scale. It benefits from spectacle. It benefits from having scenes designed to linger, to be clipped, to be remembered when ballots are filled out. In that sense, the film represents a perfect storm of eligibility.
The larger mistake comes when nomination totals are treated as proof of timelessness. Whether Sinners will endure, whether it will still be discussed, taught, or referenced years from now, is not something anyone can honestly answer yet. Cultural impact requires distance.
For now, Sinners proves not that it is one of the greatest films ever made, but that it understands the system it’s moving through.
It knows how to be seen, how to be heard and how to be counted. The nominations tell us it has won the season. Whether it wins history remains an open question.
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