I finally got around to watching Sinners recently, due to all the Oscar buzz surrounding it. I thought it must be a truly amazing piece of cinema if it has broken the Oscar nominations record… 16 of them! With that amount of gold statues on the line, Sinners must be one of the greatest films ever made. I got to the end credits with one question in my head… why?

Look, I’m not about to rag on Sinners, there seems to be a trend of jumping on the “hate bandwagon”, but that’s not what I do. Still, I don’t understand the high praise and 16 Oscar nominations. My personal opinion is that Sinners was an okay watch. Very slow in places, needlessly dragged out, and they could’ve easily cut 30-40 minutes and delivered a snapper film. Overall, it was okay.

The story of two criminal brothers on the run, heading to a watering hole and being attacked by vampires has been done. Done better too, 30 years ago with From Dusk Till Dawn. The similarities between the two films can’t be denied. Even writer/director of Sinners, Ryan Coogler has gone on record as saying that Robert Rodriguez films like The Faculty and From Dusk Till Dawn were an influence. It’s clear to see too.

Here’s the thing though, when it was released, From Dusk Till Dawn was new, refreshing, bold. It was a vampire flick that subverted expectations. Sinners is trite, contrived and trying to copy what went before. The clichés with Sinners are plentiful. You want a scene of (when they learn they’re dealing with vampires) a character asking another character to promise to kill them if they’re ever bitten then, lo and behold, that’s exactly what happens, and the bitten character has to remind the other of the promise? Yep, that’s here. Perhaps you’d prefer a scene where the main bad guy has his victim in his hands for an easy kill (or in this case, turn into a vampire), but instead of just doing it, the main bad guy does a pointless speech, needlessly prolongs the kill… only to be stabbed in the back by the hero, complete with the exact camera shot that you’re thinking of right now? Yep, that’s here too.

This is all Sinners is, a collection of trite, overused clichés compiled as a sort of greatest hits. 16 Oscar nominations, why? It’s up for Best Original Screenplay… for stealing ideas from other films and cramming in the clichés? That’s (possibly) Oscar-worthy these days? Oscars used to be about outstanding achievements within filmmaking, now they seem to just hand them out to “whatever”.

Just to show a bit of balance, do you know what one of my favourite films in recent years is? Everything Everywhere All at Once, I adored that flick. Brilliant, unique, stylish, bold, and all that crap. However, not once during my multiple times of watching it did I feel it was Oscar-worthy. Yet it won seven of them, nominated for 11. Maybe I thought it was a bit too “out there” to be an Oscar contender? In retrospect, I think it deserved to win because it was so different and refreshing. Sinners isn’t different or refreshing.

It seems to me that the fact Sinners is set during the whole unpleasant Jim Crow Laws era, forced racial segregation, and all that, is the reason it is getting high praise. It can’t be for the mediocre cliché vampire stuff, can it? Yet, the whole racist South stuff is hardly in the film. There’s a bit at the beginning, it pops up again at the very end… and that’s it. This isn’t The Color Purple, this isn’t Intruder in the Dust, this isn’t Selma, this isn’t 12 Years a Slave. This is an okay vampire film that lightly uses the racist South as a forgettable and easy-to-swap-out backdrop.

I just don’t understand the 16 Oscar nominations for such an unremarkable, middling movie. My personal view is that it only deserves one of them, and that’s for the music, the music is amazing. I have thought on this and the only logical conclusion I’ve managed to come to is that Sinners’ 16 Oscar nominations aren’t a measure of how good that film is, it’s a measure of how bad films generally were in 2025. You do have to keep in mind that 2025 saw the release of The Minecraft Movie, so competition for great movies was a very low bar.