Michael B. Jordan, 38, has given awards-worthy performances since he was a teenager. He now appears poised for his first Oscar nomination for playing twin bootleggers in frequent collaborator Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.”
15
Age when Jordan delivered an indelible performance as the softhearted, conflicted teen drug dealer Wallace on HBO’s “The Wire.”
2
Despite being considered one of the finest television shows of all time, “The Wire” received only two Emmy nominations — both for writing — and won neither.
20+
“Breakthrough” awards and other mentions poured in for Jordan’s nuanced portrayal of Oscar Grant, a real-life Bay Area man killed by transit police, in Coogler’s 2013 debut feature “Fruitvale Station.”
1
Although none of the top awards bodies recognized his “Fruitvale Station” performance, Jordan received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for best male lead.
2016
The prestigious National Society of Film Critics named Jordan best actor for his portrayal of boxer Adonis Creed in “Creed,” Coogler’s expansion of the “Rocky” franchise.
0
Despite the NSFC signaling his arrival as a bona fide movie star, Jordan was left off the Oscar, Golden Globe, SAG and BAFTA nominations lists.
2018
Jordan’s performance as complex antagonist Erik Killmonger in Coogler’s “Black Panther” drew widespread awards attention from critics groups, and the film’s cast won the SAG ensemble prize — Jordan’s highest acting honor to date.
4 (ish)
Although the data is shaky, it appears Jordan would be the fourth lead actor nominated for playing multiple characters in a movie if he gets the nod for “Sinners,” after Peter Sellers (“Dr. Strangelove”), Lee Marvin (“Cat Ballou”) and Nicolas Cage (“Adaptation”).
1
Only Marvin won, in 1966, for playing two gunmen — one far more broadly than the other.
How do you find inspiration? Say you’re doing your holiday shopping and you’re struggling to find the perfect gift for that difficult person on your list — parent, partner, paramour. How do you let your mind drift to a place where the clouds part and you achieve a sort of awakening?
I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter, back in your inbox for the next few months as we sail through the atmospheric river of awards season. Climb aboard.
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Cover story: The best six minutes in movies this year
(Bexx Francois / For The Times)
You might remember how much I love “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s audacious, genre-defying blockbuster that explores the intrinsic power of American blues music and Black life in the Jim Crow South within the context of a vampire horror movie.
So I was thrilled to talk with Coogler and his longtime department heads — a movie family that includes Oscar winners who have been with him since his 2013 debut, “Fruitvale Station” — for The Envelope’s first cover story of the season. There were a dozen different ways I could have gone with the piece, but our conversations kept coming back to the scene in the juke joint when young Sammie (Miles Caton) conjures spirits from the past and future onto the dance floor.
How did Coogler summon this scene? It goes back to that question I asked at the outset: How do you find inspiration?
For Coogler, “Sinners” began on Nov. 17, 2021, a date fixed in his mind because it was the day one of his favorite rappers, Young Dolph, was murdered. Coogler was devastated. And his mind drifted back to Nipsey Hussle, the L.A. rapper gunned down outside his South L.A. clothing store in 2019. Coogler was living in Los Angeles at the time, trying to get a “Space Jam” sequel off the ground.
“I felt like I had my heart ripped out, bro,” Coogler told me. “I have two younger brothers I’m really close with, and I remember reading an article in the L.A. Times about his older brother recounting what happened. It just broke me. And then I get the news that Dolph’s been killed in his hometown, and I just remember feeling, ‘I’m done with rap, man.’”
Later, Coogler spoke with his friend, “Black Panther” producer Nate Moore, lamenting that rappers who talk about their lives, beating the odds and escaping hardship, sometimes end up succumbing to the thing they thought they left behind. Moore isn’t a rap guy, but told Coogler that his favorite music, grunge, was just like that — in this case, artists addressing their struggles with depression and addiction and then, on occasion, overdosing or taking their own lives.
Toward the end of that day, Coogler was driving back from the set of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” Passing through Byron, Ga., the Oakland native looked out his window and saw, for the first time in his life, a cotton field. During our interview, Coogler pulls out his phone and finds a video his sister-in-law shot of him taking it all in and picking a sprig of cotton. Coogler kept it, eventually putting it on his work desk at home.
“That was a part of finding ‘Sinners,’” Coogler says. “The other thing that happened was I started listening to grunge music, taking a break from rap. And as soon as I put the music on, I was like, ‘Yo, this feels like my uncle’s. It led me right back to his record collection.”
That uncle, James Edmonson, loved the blues. Coogler’s cousin, Edmonson’s youngest daughter, told the filmmaker about a Bill Withers’ song, “I Can’t Write Left-Handed,” written from the perspective of a Vietnam veteran. Coogler listened to it, and it reminded him of “Rooster,” the Alice in Chains song written by guitarist Jerry Cantrell for his father, who served in Vietnam.
“So I’m playing these two songs one after another, and I’m like, ‘These genres that you wouldn’t find next to each other at a Tower Records back in the day, they’re so close,’” Coogler says. “And studying the history of it, it’s people playing it different, but it’s the same idea.”
“And that’s when I realized I had to make ‘Sinners.’”
Coogler scrolls through his phone and shows a picture of the cotton sprig on his desk. He dedicated “Sinners” to his uncle, who died about a decade before it arrived in theaters.
“So many cosmic moments came together for this movie,” Coogler says. “I was always like, ‘All right. I just gotta make sure I don’t f— it up.’”
There’s a good chance that a horror movie will be nominated for the 2025 best picture Oscar.
And if Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” or Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” make the cut, it will be the first time in the Academy Awards’ 97-year history that a fright film has been nominated in consecutive contests.
It’s long overdue. And if you believe part of Oscars’ purpose is to promote the industry and celebrate its achievements, there’s no better time for the academy to get over its traditional disdain for cinematic monstrosities.
As most other sectors of Hollywood’s film business look precarious — adult dramas, the traditional awards season ponies, are dropping like dead horses at the box office, while attendance for the once-mighty superhero supergenre continues to disappoint — horror has hit its highest annual gross of all time, $1.2 billion, with a good two months left to go.
“Sinners,” released in April, remains in fifth place on the domestic box office chart with $279 million. Its fellow Warner Bros. offerings “The Conjuring: Last Rites,” “Weapons” and “Final Destination: Bloodlines” occupied slots 12 through 14 as of mid-October.
Mia Goth as Elizabeth and Oscar Isaac in “Frankenstein.”
(Ken Woroner / Netflix)
“Horror has been, historically, the Rodney Dangerfield of genres,” notes Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends for global media measurement firm Comscore. “It can’t get no respect.
“But horror is very important to the industry on so many levels now,” he continues. “We have four horror movies in the top 15 this year, all of those generating over $100 million in domestic box office. And to make a significant scary horror movie, you don’t have to break the bank. Look at [‘Weapons’ filmmaker Zach Cregger’s 2022 breakout feature] ‘Barbarian’; half of that was shot in a basement.” Similarly, compare “Sinners’” $90 million price tag to “Black Panther’s” $200 million.
Horror’s popularity has gone in cycles since Universal’s run of classic monster movies in the early 1930s. But profitability has been a reliable bet more often than not — and Karloff’s “Frankenstein” and Lugosi’s “Dracula” still resonate through pop culture while most best picture winners of the same era are forgotten.
Still, it wasn’t until 1974 that “The Exorcist” received the first best picture nomination for a horror film, and ahead of the success of “The Substance” at the 2025 Oscar nominations the genre’s fortunes had only marginally improved. Indeed, many of the titles usually cited as a mark of horror’s growing foothold in awards season — “Jaws,” “The Sixth Sense,” “Black Swan,” 1991 winner “The Silence of the Lambs” — are arguably better characterized as something else entirely, or at best as hybrids. (To wit, the sole monster movie that’s won best picture, Del Toro’s 2017 “The Shape of Water,” is primarily considered a romantic fantasy.)
Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
Fright films’ reputation for delivering cheap thrills to undiscerning audiences was often deserved, but there were always stellar horror films that the academy overlooked. And more recently, films such as “The Substance,” “Sinners” and Jordan Peele’s 2017 nominee “Get Out” have pierced ingrained voter prejudices against the genre by adding social commentary and undeniable aesthetic quality without compromising gory fundamentals.
“The horror genre really does seem to be attracting great directors who are immersed in it, have a real auteur point-of-view and make interesting movies that have horror elements but explore other themes as well,” notes The Envelope’s awards columnist, Glenn Whipp. “‘Sinners’ is Ryan Coogler’s vampire movie, but it’s also about the Jim Crow South and American blues music. How can you resist that if you’re an academy voter?”
And with horror packing in filmgoers like no other genre, high-profile nominations could help the Academy Awards broadcast attract the bigger ratings its stakeholders have been desperately seeking at least since “The Dark Knight” failed to make the best picture cut in 2008.
Austin Abrams in “Weapons.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
“That was the whole reason we went to 10 potential nominees,” Dergarabedian recalls. “We wanted to have more blockbuster representation at the Oscars. This may be the perfect storm. If I were an academy voter, I would vote for ‘Sinners’ and ‘Weapons.’ I don’t think that’s an overstatement, given the films that have come out this year.”
Even beyond this “perfect storm,” though, Whipp sees a sea change afoot.
“Everything’s an Oscar movie now if it’s well made,” he says. “Studios aren’t really making traditional, grown-up dramas and the academy can only nominate what’s in front of them. Horror is being produced at a rate that is greater than it used to be, and at least two of these Warner movies really landed with audiences and critics. The genre is attracting some of our top filmmakers right now, and that’s something that will trickle down to the Oscars.”
“This is not a blip,” Dergarabedian concludes. “It’s a trend that feels like it’s happened overnight but it’s been a long time coming. Back in 2017 we had our first $1-billion-plus horror movie box office. If they stop making good horror movies it might be a blip, but I think Hollywood should take this and bloody run with it.”
