And then I woke up extra-early over the same, and then, exhausted by all the stress, I sank into a coma at 8 am and only just woke up at 9:30 am. Is Samuel Z. Arkoff celebrating in heaven? Aaaaaggghhh! …Clayton Davis lowers the boom!
Wasn’t it called Judas and the Black Messiah?
Let me get this straight: Ryan Coogler’s popcorn exploitation film (Irish vampires, good cunnilingus, Mississippi Delta blues, yokel racism) has gathered 16 Oscar nominations, the most for any film in history…fine. And yet (here’s the problem) the previous record holders for the most Oscar nominations — All About Eve, Titanic and La La Land, all with 14 — were and are, unlike Sinners, exceptionally good, dynamic, high-pedigree films.
Sentimental Value only received a piddly nine Oscar nominations this morning (kidding…nine noms is a tremendous feat for this Norwegian family drama), but it is surely a far richer, deeper and smarter achievement than Sinners…ten or fifteen times better, don’t get me started.
Is there any Academy member out there who would be gauche enough to speak of Sinners and the whipsmart, ultra-sophisticated Eve in the same breath? Titanic didn’t just make a ton of money, but hit the emotional jackpot across the board — obviously the highly profitable Sinners, a crude political allegory, never even tried to melt hearts. The closest analogy, I suppose, would be La-La Land, which was propelled by music as much as Sinners (although, due respect to Jack O’Connell‘s Irish soft shoe, only Damien Chazelle‘s film invested in knockout dance sequences).
I won’t argue that Ben-Hur (12 nominations) is a much better film than Sinners, but it’s certainly a “bigger” show…classier, costlier, more big-canvas-y, more breathtaking here and there, more grandiose. Plus Sinners doesn’t have anything close to a big, wowser, super-thrilling chariot race-type sequence…nothing that even begins to compete on that level. And there’s certainly no scene in Ben-Hur in which Charlton Heston‘s Judah Ben-Hur drops to his knees in order to give great head to Haya Hayareet‘s Esther.