Sinners' historic Oscar breakthrough spotlights an evolved Academy

Over the last decade, the Academy Awards have faced a litany of criticism. In 2015, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite successfully shamed the Oscars into making some membership changes. The campaign, started by media strategist April Reign, was launched in response to the voters failing to nominate a single person of color in its acting categories. But the shame around choosing Eddie Redmayne’s turn as Stephen Hawking in Theory Of Everything over David Oyelowo’s Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma wasn’t an immediate come-to-Jesus moment for the Academy. The next year, nominees were once again So White. A few years later, the voters would remain stodgy enough to give Green Book a Best Picture win. But after a 2016 initiative to diversify the Academy’s membership, things began to change.

The years following have also seen a more diverse set of movies in contention for the major awards, as the Academy has been begrudgingly outgrowing the typical definition of an “Oscar movie” for the last 25 years. The slow pushback to a long-running prejudice against genre movies (begun in earnest after The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King swept the Awards), led to Guillermo del Toro’s sad, sexy monster movies becoming Oscar staples. As if to exemplify the change in the Academy’s thinking, The Shape Of Water, a movie about a woman’s sexual awakening aided by the Creature From The Black Lagoon, was considered somewhat of a safe pick in 2018, when it received 13 nominations. A movie about sex with a fish-man couldn’t be described as Oscar bait. Neither could Parasite, Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 masterpiece, which benefited from a growing proportion of international voters to become the first non-English-language Best Picture winner. Since 2018, the Oscars have nominated at least one international film for Best Picture, including Anatomy Of A Fall and Drive My Car. Last year alone speaks to what the expanded field (and voting body) did for the Oscars, which carved out room in the category for Dune: Part Two, Wicked, The Substance, and Nickel Boys. Regardless of one’s feelings about the Academy Awards, it’s hard to call any of those nominees—whether it be a sci-fi sequel, a body-horror makeover, a Broadway fantasy, or an experimental first-person drama—anything other than the sign of an organization willing to change.

This leads to June 2025, when the Academy expanded its membership to more than 10,000 people, a nearly 40% increase from 2015. While this didn’t totally offset its lopsided demographics (the Academy, like the rest of the film industry, is still overwhelmingly white and male), it did help diversify the body. In 2025, 41% of the Academy’s invitees were women, 45% were people of color, and 55% were from overseas.

It’s hard not to attribute Sinners‘ record-setting nomination total as a reflection of this expanded field. A sharp rebuttal to the past two years of media cowardice and corporate reneging on diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Oscars’ more diverse membership did as intended: Put the Academy more in line with the industry it’s aiming to represent and the moviegoers who watch their art. And, after all the handwringing about Ryan Coogler’s deal, Sinners was a genuine hit. It was the eighth-highest-grossing movie of 2025, and the only one in the top 10 that’s not a sequel, adaptation, or remake. An original vampire film, with a cast and creative team full of Black talent, being the movie to set this nomination record is a one-two punch for the Academy—the Oscars’ days of shunning genre movies are over, and their days of being So White are seemingly on the way out too.