‘Sinners’ vs. ‘One Battle After Another’: Who’s Getting the Oscars Gold?

If you’ve seen “One Battle After Another,” you surely remember the “River of Hills” sequence near the end of the film. 

Having narrowly avoided death, Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti) makes a getaway, speeding through a wave-like stretch of road with Christmas Adventurers Club member Tim Smith (John Hoogenakker) in hot pursuit.

Willa outfoxes Tim, stopping her car right after she crests a hill (where the sun will keep him from braking in time) and taking up a firing position.  

“One Battle After Another,” to this point in the awards race, has handily driven over hill after hill, picking up the top prizes at various ceremonies with ease. Last week, it seemed like nothing could get between it and Best Picture.

Then “Sinners” stopped the car at the peak of the Actor Awards, and now everything’s thrown out of whack.

So let’s break down why “One Battle After Another” got frontrunner status, why last weekend proved “Sinners” is still very much in the race and what each film has going in its favor.

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An unbeatable win streak — or is it?

“Sinners” has a titanic competitor in “One Battle After Another,” which picked up top prizes at the PGAs, DGAs, Golden Globes (Comedy/Musical), Critics Choice Awards and BAFTAs, among other accolades.

The Actor Awards was essentially the first time “Sinners” bested “One Battle” outside of its record-breaking nomination haul (and we’ve talked before about how nominations aren’t predictive of wins).

While the momentum could be helpful for “Sinners,” a Best Ensemble win alone isn’t the biggest Best Picture boon. Exactly half of all Best Ensemble winners at the Actor Awards went on to win Best Picture, while half did not. 

There’s also a strange history in the past 15 years of the Actor Awards recognizing Black ensembles that the Oscars pass up for Best Picture (“The Help,” “Hidden Figures,” “Black Panther”) and failing to award Black ensembles that do win Best Picture (“12 Years a Slave,” “Moonlight”). 

Compare the Actor Awards to other ceremonies where “One Battle After Another” came out on top. 73% of PGA winners this century also won Best Picture. The same can be said for 69% of DGA and Critics Choice winners.

The PGA win feels especially relevant given that the guild, like the Academy, uses ranked-choice voting to determine the winner. A “One Battle” win could mean that PTA’s film fares better in that format, where voters rank their options from one through 10 rather than picking a single victor. 

The sheer number of awards won by “One Battle After Another” would make a Best Picture loss shocking. But it’s happened before. “Brokeback Mountain” took home statues at the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, WGAs, DGAs, PGAs and Critics Choice before famously losing Best Picture to “Crash” in 2006.

Thankfully, “Sinners” is one of the best movies of the year, while “Crash” is one of the worst Best Picture winners of all time. So the situations aren’t exactly the same.

A Best Actor shake-up

“Sinners” didn’t just win Best Ensemble at the Actor Awards. Michael B. Jordan also won Best Male Actor in a Leading Role.

This victory toppled a lot of dominoes that could work in “Sinners’” favor. It also completely shook up the Best Actor category at the Academy Awards.

For a long time, it seemed like Timothée Chalamet had this category on lock. I even wrote a piece a few weeks ago about why I thought he would win in one of the strongest Best Actor lineups in years.

But things change. While Chalamet seemed invincible when he won at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice, the BAFTAs and Actor Awards (two voting groups that cross over with the Academy) told a different story. Whether they chose Michael B. Jordan or Robert Aramayo (“I Swear”), voters were saying Chalamet was not their guy.

Historically, the Academy does not give Best Actor to young men, and Chalamet would be the second-youngest winner in history. So maybe I was wrong, and the Academy is telling Timmy, “You need to be this tall to ride.”

Did Chalamet’s viral marketing campaign, steering into the self-aggrandizing qualities of Marty Mauser, get in the way of an Oscar win? It’s possible that it rubbed voters the wrong way, given how the race is now going.

Whether or not that’s true, Chalamet did make “Marty Supreme” the highest-grossing A24 film of all time and further established himself as a capital-M Movie Star.

Now Jordan sits in the driver’s seat. 73% of men who win Best Actor from SAG get the same award at the Oscars (though Chalamet won the Actor Award and lost the Oscar just last year). The last time somebody won the Academy Award without the Actor or the BAFTA was 2004 — funnily enough, when current Best Supporting Actor frontrunner Sean Penn got the Oscar for “Mystic River.”

None of this year’s Best Actor nominees have much of a historical precedent. Nobody this century has won the Oscar with only an Actor Award (Jordan) or a Golden Globe (Wagner Moura), and Penn was the last one to win with only a Globe and a Critics Choice Award (like Chalamet). This season is far more spread out than we’re used to.

I still see a path for Moura winning Best Actor. Because the Actor Awards failed to nominate a single international performance, Moura and Jordan didn’t go head-to-head at last week’s ceremony, but “The Secret Agent” did best “Sinners” for Best Actor at the Golden Globes. A heavily international voting body at the Academy could take Moura across the finish line.

Combine the potential of a Jordan win with two wide-open supporting categories (where Wunmi Mosaku and Delroy Lindo are very much in play for their own statues), plus the Original Screenplay award that’s likely going to “Sinners.” That makes a pretty compelling case for a Best Picture win.

Watch me break down what Michael B. Jordan’s win could mean for the race.

The “Sinners” surge — tracking the vibe shift

Every once in a while, an awards season moment comes along that gives me genuine goosebumps. 

It happened when “Parasite” won Best Picture. It happened when “Moonlight” beat “La La Land.” It even happened when “The Zone of Interest” beat a set of blockbusters to win Best Sound.

When Viola Davis read Michael B. Jordan’s name at the Actor Awards, I got that same feeling. I’m sure a lot of other people watching did too.

Statistics can tell us a lot about the Oscars, but they can’t tell us everything. If you want to make accurate predictions, you have to keep yourself open to X-factors when they come along.

That’s why, even if every number out there says “One Battle” has this in the bag, we need to pay attention to the fact that “Sinners” just had an extraordinary weekend right in the middle of Oscar voting.

The cast and crew behind “Sinners” was celebrated in a lot of rooms on Saturday and Sunday: the Actor Awards, the NAACP Image Awards. Even the PGA Awards showed massive enthusiasm despite a “One Battle” win.

People love this movie, and they’re in the mood to celebrate it. Maybe voters wanted to recreate these moments as they filled out their ballots.

The one major advantage an Actor Awards win has over all the others is that SAG-AFTRA voted far more recently than its peers. Though the Actor Awards were held only a day after the PGAs, they were voted on about a month apart. The PGA cast their ballots in early February, while voting for the Actor Awards only locked days before the ceremony. This could be a sign that voters’ minds have changed in the month between Oscar nominations and Oscar voting.

“Sinners’” final major advantage is that it benefits from being the underdog. While films like “Oppenheimer” and “Argo” moved through awards season with relative ease, there is plenty of precedent for frontrunners losing steam. “Roma,” “1917” and “The Power of the Dog” were all tipped as early favorites, but the Oscars ultimately went to other films.

The odds are still heavily in “One Battle’s” favor going into this final week. But “Sinners” finally put a massive chink in its competitor’s armor at the most opportune time imaginable: right as ballots were being cast. The thought of that Best Picture trophy landing in Coogler’s hands instead of Anderson’s feels a lot more possible now than it did last week.

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