Sinners becomes the first film in history to receive 16 Academy Award nominations Oscars 2026

Sinners, director Ryan Coogler’s critically and commercially acclaimed supernatural thriller, has become the first film to be nominated for 16 Oscars.

The film, starring Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers who start a blues club in 1930s Mississippi while fighting racism and vampires, has so far grossed $368 million worldwide. It was nominated for awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Lead Actor, Supporting Actor (for British actor Delroy Lindo), Supporting Actress (for British-Nigerian actor Wunmi Mosaku) and the Academy’s inaugural Casting Choice Award.

The film’s nod for costume design makes Ruth E. Carter — who has now been nominated five times overall — the most nominated Black woman in the entire 98-year history of the Academy Awards.

The Sinners’ multiple nods mean it breaks the record of 14 nominations shared by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997) and La La Land (2016). But while those films turned their nominations into a slew of wins (six, 11 and six, respectively), the expectation is that Coogler’s drama could end with a lower score on March 15.

So far this season, the ragtag counterculture comedy “Battle After Battle” has dominated the awards, and at the Oscars, it trails “Sinners” with 13 nominations.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, a veteran Oscar bridesmaid who has been nominated but not won 11 times, is widely expected to take home the awards for best picture and best director, and supporting actress Teyana Taylor is also expected to win in her category. Three of the film’s other stars – Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Benicio del Toro – were also nominated, although Infiniti’s Chase was a surprising omission from the shortlist of leading actresses, while Song Blue’s Kate Hudson was nominated.

Meanwhile, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet also performed well, earning eight nominations, including for Jessie Buckley – an easy favorite in the best actress category – although Paul Mescal was a surprise in the supporting actor category. Zhao also edited, executive produced and co-wrote the Maggie O’Farrell adaptation, which is Anderson’s main rival in the original screenplay race (Coogler, her former film school classmate, is the original screenplay nominee).

In 2021, Zhao became the second woman (and first woman of color) to win the 2021 Best Director Oscar for Nomadland; This year she is the only female director on the shortlist, along with Anderson, Coogler, Guillermo del Toro for Frankenstein and Josh Safdie for Marty Supreme, which received a better-than-expected nine nominations.

This film’s star, Timothée Chalamet, is the front-runner for Best Actor for his role as a ping-pong hustler in post-war New York. Chalamet narrowly missed out on winning the Oscar last year, when Adrien Brody, who played Bob Dylan in The Brutalist, won. If he wins, Chalamet – who turned 30 last month – will become the second-youngest best actor winner ever, after Brody won in 2003 for The Pianist.

But there was no good news for Chalamet’s Marty Supreme co-star, Gwyneth Paltrow, whose return to movies after a 10-year hiatus from Goop did not result in a nomination. Other stars who will be disappointed by Thursday’s announcement include Dwayne Johnson and Sidney Sweeney, both of whom went on to have transformative outings for sports biopics The Smashing Machine and Christy, as well as George Clooney and Cynthia Erivo.

Wicked for Good performed poorly across the board, scoring no nods — including a nod to Ariana Grande’s widely anticipated supporting actress — while Jay Kelly’s Noah Baumbach film, which stars Clooney as a movie star reevaluating his life choices, walked away empty-handed.

Instead, the spread of nominations this year reflects the academy’s increasing internationalism, with subtitled films like Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, and It Was Just an Accident named in multiple categories.

“Sentimental value” featured particularly strongly from the nominations, with nine nominations in total, including four acting nods — for Inga Ibsdotter Lilias, Elle Fanning, Renate Rainsf, and Stellan Skarsgård — as well as Best Picture and Best Director for Joachim Trier.

Meanwhile, The Secret Agent star Wagner Moura became the first Brazilian to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor. The film was also nominated for Acting, International Film and Best Picture. The nods for Moura, Rensef, Lilias and Skarsgård (Fanning only speaks English in the film) set a new record for foreign language acting nominees.

This success continues a trend that began in 2020 with multiple Parasite wins and was seen again last year by strong performances at the shortlisting stage for I’m Still Here and Emilia Pérez (Sean Baker’s Anora eventually triumphed on the board).

More than a quarter of the roughly 11,000 voters today come from outside the United States, and the overall demographic distribution is more diverse than it was a decade ago. A 2014 Los Angeles Times survey found that the average age of Oscar voters was 63, 76% of whom were men and 94% were white. Ten years later, active measures to reform this file – including almost doubling the numbers – mean that at least 35% of voters identify themselves as women, and at least 25% of them belong to ethnic minorities.

Thursday’s nominations are a victory for studio Warner Bros., which is currently a takeover target by Netflix and whose roster last year included Sinners and One Battle After Another, as well as Superman, F1 and Webs.

The second batch of Oscars voting begins on February 26, and includes a newly introduced measure to ensure voters see all films nominated within a category before they can cast a vote in the final round.

The ceremony will take place on March 15 and will once again be hosted by Conan O’Brien. Three weeks ago, the BAFTA Awards will be handed out at a ceremony moderated by new presenter Alan Cumming; Nominations for these awards will be revealed next Tuesday.

“Battle After Battle” and “Hamnet” were the big winners at the Golden Globes earlier this week, but the division of those awards into drama, musical or comedy categories puts them at the top of the traditionally discredited Oscars.