The Brief

The 98th Academy Awards ceremony takes place Sunday at the Dolby Theatre, with Ryan Coogler’s vampire thriller Sinners carrying a record-shattering 16 nominations — two more than any film in Oscar history. Conan O’Brien returns as host for a second consecutive year, presiding over a ceremony that includes the debut of Best Casting as a competitive category and a field led by Warner Bros. with 30 total nominations across its slate.

The Report

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a vampire saga set in the Jim Crow-era American South starring Michael B. Jordan in dual roles, will enter Sunday’s ceremony as the most nominated film in the 98-year history of the Academy Awards. Its 16 nominations surpass by two the record of 14 shared by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997), and La La Land (2016).

The film earned nods in every category in which it was eligible: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Jordan), Best Supporting Actor (Delroy Lindo), Best Supporting Actress (Wunmi Mosaku), Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Autumn Durald Arkapaw), Best Costume Design (Ruth E. Carter), Best Production Design, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score (Ludwig Göransson), Best Original Song, Best Sound, Best Visual Effects, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and the newly created Best Casting (Francine Maisler).

Ten Black artists received nominations for their work on the film, matching the record set by Judas and the Black Messiah in 2021. Among them, Carter became the most-nominated Black woman in Oscar history with her fifth nod, surpassing Viola Davis. Durald Arkapaw became the first woman of colour nominated for Best Cinematography. Should Coogler win Best Director, he would be the first Black filmmaker to do so.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another follows with 13 nominations, while Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Sentimental Value each secured nine. Del Toro was notably absent from the Best Director shortlist despite his film’s strong showing. The biggest omission was Wicked: For Good, which received zero nominations after its predecessor earned 10 and won two the previous year.

Warner Bros. led all studios with 30 nominations, driven primarily by Sinners and One Battle After Another. Netflix and Neon tied for second with 18 each.

O’Brien’s return follows a 2025 debut that delivered the ceremony’s highest ratings in five years. Producers Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan are back for a third year alongside Jeff Ross and Mike Sweeney.

Sinners has grossed approximately $370 million worldwide against a production budget of $90–100 million, making it the fifth highest-grossing horror film of all time. The ceremony airs live on ABC at 7 p.m. ET on March 15, with 24 competitive categories — one more than last year.

The Angle

The nomination count is the headline, but the more interesting number is the one underneath it. Sinners made $370 million at the box office — a vampire film set during Jim Crow, directed by a filmmaker whose previous Academy recognition amounted to a single Best Picture nomination for Black Panther. The industry story for two decades has been that original genre filmmaking at this budget level is a bet the studios will not take. Warner Bros. took it. The audience showed up. The Academy followed.

What Coogler has built is worth noting for what it is not. It is not a prestige drama calibrated for awards consideration. It is not a historical trauma narrative packaged for institutional recognition. It is a genre film — fangs, period setting, Southern Gothic — that happened to be made with sufficient craft and ambition that excluding it from the top categories would have been more conspicuous than including it. The 16 nominations are less a coronation than an admission: the Academy’s traditional category architecture could not find a seam in which to exclude any part of the work.

The record for Black nominees on a single film being matched rather than broken is the kind of detail that reveals what it is measuring. In a ceremony with 24 competitive categories, the ceiling for any demographic’s representation in a single film is set by the number of credited roles that intersect with those categories. Ten out of 16 is not a symbolic milestone. It is what happens when a Black filmmaker staffs key creative positions with Black artists and the work is good enough that the nominations follow the credits rather than routing around them. The quiet fact is that this was always arithmetically available. It required the film, not the rule change.