Coogler’s ‘Sinners’ upends Actor Awards, jolting the Oscar best picture race

On a night built to put performers in the spotlight, the actors changed the script.

‘Sinners’ takes top film honor

Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending drama Sinners won the top film prize at the 32nd Actor Awards on Sunday, taking outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture and halting what had looked like an unbroken march for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another toward the Academy Awards.

The win at the Shrine Auditorium & Expo Hall in Los Angeles was widely viewed inside the industry as a surprise. Anderson’s film had dominated nearly every major awards stop this season, including the Golden Globes, the Producers Guild of America, the Directors Guild of America, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and the Critics Choice Awards.

Instead, actors in SAG-AFTRA, who choose the nominees and winners for the union’s annual honors, rallied around Coogler’s hybrid of Southern Gothic period drama, gangster picture, horror film and musical. The ensemble victory, coupled with a lead actor win for Michael B. Jordan for his dual role in Sinners, instantly reshaped the narrative heading into the 98th Academy Awards later this month.

Why the Actor Awards matter

The Actor Awards, formerly known as the Screen Actors Guild Awards, are the last major televised ceremony before the Oscars and have long been watched for clues about how Academy voters may lean. While the union’s top ensemble prize has historically predicted best picture at the Oscars only a little more than half the time, its acting categories often align with the winners on Hollywood’s biggest stage.

From 1995 through 2023, the cast award and the eventual best picture winner matched in 15 of 29 years. In the three years before Sunday’s ceremony, the correlation was perfect: CODA, Everything Everywhere All at Once and Oppenheimer all took both prizes. Lead acting winners have an even stronger record. Analysts generally put the Actor Awards–Oscar match rate at roughly three-quarters in the best actor and best actress categories.

This year’s ceremony, streamed live globally on Netflix and hosted by Kristen Bell, was the first held under the “Actor Awards” branding. SAG-AFTRA leaders have said the new name is meant to make clear that the show honors performers—not the union as an institution—a symbolic shift as the organization reasserts itself following its 2023 strike over pay, residuals and the use of artificial intelligence.

A commercial and creative outlier

Coogler’s film arrived at the Shrine already in a rare position. Sinners leads all contenders at the upcoming Oscars with 16 nominations, the most in Academy history and more than the 14 nominations earned by All About Eve, Titanic and La La Land. It has also been a commercial outlier: an original, R-rated, Black-led horror film that has taken in about $365 million worldwide.

Set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi in the early 1930s, Sinners follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack—both played by Jordan—as they return home after World War I and time in Al Capone’s Chicago underworld. The film layers supernatural horror and musical sequences onto themes of generational trauma, religious faith and the exploitation of Black communities in the American South, refracted through vampirism.

Coogler, who previously directed Fruitvale Station, Creed and two Black Panther films, returned to original material with Sinners after a decade working largely in franchise storytelling. He did so on unusually favorable terms. Under a deal that has drawn interest and concern across Hollywood, he retained final cut and significant creative control and is set to obtain full ownership of the film 25 years after its release—an arrangement that some studio executives have privately warned could unsettle traditional profit and rights structures if widely copied.

Coogler has said publicly that he has no plans to turn Sinners into a franchise, describing his goal as making the movie feel like “a full meal … a holistic and finished thing.”

The season’s front-runner stumbles

Anderson’s One Battle After Another, by contrast, entered the Actor Awards as the season’s anointed favorite. The black comedy action-thriller, centered on a father-daughter story of political resistance and shot on revived VistaVision film equipment, is Anderson’s highest-grossing film, earning more than $200 million globally. It has been favored by critics and technical guilds, winning the top PGA award, the DGA’s feature directing prize for Anderson, the BAFTA for best film and major critics’ honors in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

At the Actor Awards, One Battle After Another did not leave empty-handed. Sean Penn won outstanding performance by a male actor in a supporting role for his turn in the film. But its loss in the ensemble category broke an almost perfect run through the season’s precursors.

The Associated Press described the outcome as one that “shook up the Oscar race,” noting that Coogler’s film had disrupted an “almost unblemished run of awards” for Anderson’s movie. The AP reported that the cast win demonstrates that Sinners “has a strong chance to win at the Oscars, too,” even as One Battle After Another remains bolstered by its guild and critics sweep.

Jordan’s victory for lead male actor in a motion picture was another boost for Sinners. Accepting his award, he told the audience he “wasn’t expecting this at all,” a remark that underscored how fluid the race remains despite his film’s nomination tally.

Other major winners

In the lead actress race, Jessie Buckley won for her performance in Hamnet, while Amy Madigan was honored as supporting actress for Weapons. Buckley’s win instantly positioned her as a favorite for the best actress Oscar, given the historical alignment between the Actor Awards and the Academy in that category.

On the television side, HBO’s newsroom drama The Pitt was named outstanding ensemble in a drama series, and star Noah Wyle took the individual drama actor award. The comedy series prizes went to The Studio, which won for ensemble and earned acting trophies for Seth Rogen and Catherine O’Hara. O’Hara’s win, for a role completed before her death in January, added an emotional note to the evening.

Keri Russell was named best female actor in a drama series for her work on the geopolitical Netflix drama The Diplomat. Michelle Williams won for female actor in a limited series or TV movie for Dying for Sex, while Owen Cooper took the male counterpart for Adolescence. Stunt ensembles were recognized in both film and television, with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and The Last of Us taking those honors.

The union’s highest individual honor, the SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award, went to Harrison Ford. Introduced by Woody Harrelson, Ford reflected on a career that has included Star Wars, Indiana Jones and decades of work in film and television. In his speech, he made light of the award, telling the crowd he was in a room full of nominees recognized for their “amazing work, while I’m here to receive a prize for being alive.”

A ceremony reflecting an industry in flux

Beyond the winners, the ceremony’s structure and platform signaled broader changes in how Hollywood presents itself. Netflix, which first streamed the SAG Awards globally in 2024, again carried the show, part of a growing trend of streamers serving as both distributors of content and broadcasters of legacy industry events. The production largely eschewed the orchestra cut-offs common at other awards shows, allowing winners more time at the microphone—an adjustment that producers have said responds to social media’s appetite for extended, shareable speeches.

The Actor Awards arrive at a delicate moment for the business. SAG-AFTRA and other unions only recently returned to work after prolonged strikes that focused in part on compensation from streaming services and protections around AI. At the same time, major studios are pursuing consolidation, with companies such as Paramount Global exploring large-scale deals even as their titles vie for awards prestige.

In that landscape, Sinners stands out as a test case on several fronts: an original, Black-centered genre film with a creator-friendly deal, sweeping institutional recognition and now the backing of the actors’ own union. The ensemble win does not erase the statistical edge that One Battle After Another holds, thanks to its Producers Guild and Directors Guild victories, which have historically been stronger predictors of the best picture Oscar than the actors’ cast prize.

But it does ensure that, as Academy members prepare to mark their final ballots, the race between the two films will be framed less as a coronation and more as a choice between contrasting visions—one an analog-shot, critics’ favorite from an established auteur, the other a sprawling, performance-driven horror musical about exploitation and survival in the American South.

Whatever decision the Academy reaches, Sunday’s ceremony made one thing clear. In the first year that their awards show has carried their name, the actors used their loudest collective voice to back a film that puts them—and the communities they portray—squarely at the center of the story.