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Put a cold-blooded spin on it and \u201cSinners\u201d is now the biggest loser in Oscars history, ceding 12 of its 16 record-breaking nominations to other films. But Ryan Coogler still won the night.<\/p>\n
In another year, I might have said \u201cSinners\u201d lost to \u201crivals\u201d or \u201ccompetitors.\u201d But on Sunday, anyone with an ego got swatted on the nose. Last year\u2019s best actor, Adrien Brody, made amends for flinging chewing gum at his wife by swallowing a fresh wad of it (and his pride). Meanwhile, this year\u2019s thirstiest aspirant, Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet<\/a>, sat in the front row and gamely took his lumps as the only contender who got repeatedly roasted, including an awkward gag when the band wheeled out a \u201cMarty Supreme\u201d-style \u201cbum drum\u201d that stood in for his public spanking.<\/p>\n The dominant mood was gratitude. Victors went beyond checking off a list of hastily scrawled names to thanking entire categories of people: women, ancestors, Koreans, audiences. Coogler was the ambassador of generous vibes, flashing the ASL sign for \u201cI love you\u201d to his colleagues and presenting a united front with the evening\u2019s other dominant figure, \u201cOne Battle After Another\u2019s\u201d Paul Thomas Anderson<\/a>, suggesting that it\u2019s less important which quality movie wins than that more quality movies get made in the first place.<\/p>\n One of the many things I admire<\/a> about \u201cSinners\u201d is its acknowledgment that artists, dreamers and visionaries like Coogler still have to exist within a system they might disagree with, possibly even hate. Michael B. Jordan\u2019s identical twins Smoke and Stack have the \u201cgrown-men money\u201d to purchase the property for their juke joint in full. But the brothers\u2019 cash goes straight into the pocket of the Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan, who more than likely spends it on the bullets he plans to murder them with in the morning.<\/p>\n Constrained by a few square miles of 1932 Mississippi, Coogler\u2019s genre-bending movie covers an astonishing amount of turf: sex, race, monsters, grief, ambition, spirituality, sacrifice, freedom and community. Yet almost every scene is also about money. Money is why Smoke and Stack flee Chicago to hide down South and why Miles Caton\u2019s Sammie wakes up at dawn to pick his daily quota of cotton. Money gets Delta Slim\u2019s good friend lynched and forces Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao) to operate two segregated grocery stores on opposite sides of the same street.<\/p>\n Some of the best scenes in \u201cSinners\u201d involve characters negotiating the value of their creative energy, from painting a sign to playing a concert, or simply just selling someone their time, as when Stack teaches the teenager watching his truck not to settle for less than her worth. Likewise, Coogler has done the math on his own career and tallied what he\u2019s called the \u201csteep price\u201d of his success, including missing the death of his great-uncle James, the relative who introduced him to Mississippi Delta blues, because he was away shooting \u201cCreed.\u201d<\/p>\n Coogler isn\u2019t whining. He knows a bit of heartbreak is the deal, no different than how he gave over a decade of his life to launching the \u201cCreed\u201d and \u201cBlack Panther\u201d franchises which belong to the studios that hired him. But he also knows that the $2 billion those hits earned afforded him the clout to make, and someday own, \u201cSinners,\u201d and that all these years he\u2019s patiently been a company man have been an investment not only in himself, but in all of the other actors and crew members he\u2019s raising up with him.<\/p>\n As host Conan O\u2019Brien alluded to in his opening monologue, Coogler declined to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 10 years ago, explaining to the Hollywood Reporter<\/a> that \u201cIf I\u2019m going to be a part of organizations, they\u2019re going to be labor unions, where we\u2019re figuring out how to take care of each other\u2019s families.\u201d Also, Coogler continued, he loves movies and simply doesn\u2019t want to rank them or \u201cbuy into this versus that.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite Coogler\u2019s rejection of the evening\u2019s fundamental premise, the crowd rose to its feet when \u201cSinners\u201d won its four awards for score, cinematography, original screenplay and lead actor. Coogler sprang faster than everyone when Autumn Durald Arkapaw<\/a> became the first female director of photography to earn an Oscar, proving that he meant those words about taking care of each other\u2019s families by racing up the aisle and back to scoop her son Aidan onto his shoulder and carry the boy closer to his mom\u2019s history-making moment.<\/p>\n The other lovely salute to Arkapaw\u2019s craft came when the Oscars restaged \u201cSinners\u2019\u201d centerpiece musical sequence more or less exactly as she did, sending a camera swirling through the onstage performance of \u201cI Lied to You.\u201d Smartly, the show\u2019s director positioned another camera at the back of the Dolby Theatre to witness yet another standing ovation for its celebration of the blues\u2019 influence on rock and funk and hip-hop and, by extension, even \u201cKPop Demon Hunters\u201d which wound up beating that number for best song.<\/p>\n