Sinners Wasn’t Snubbed: Why Timothée Chalamet Will Win the Oscar

Midnight Adams, MSc Humanitarianism, Aid & Conflict

Sinners has been an awards favourite with audiences and critics alike since its release in April 2025. In a year packed with high-profile releases, Sinners has remained the dominant choice for awards season, sweeping the board at the Critics’ Choice, Music City Film Critics’ Association Awards, and a record-breaking 16 Academy Award nominations. But one last-minute entry seeks to undermine Sinners’ dominance in the field - Marty Supreme. 

Timothée Chalamet’s seemingly unsuspecting ping-pong film has caused an enormous stir after an epic marketing campaign that highlighted his seven-year training, standing on the top of the LA sphere, and collaborating with rising rapper and lookalike EsDeeKid. Chalamet is utilising his online presence to sell the film to audiences across the spectrum in a campaign that hasn’t been seen since Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. The film is an explosive yet comedic depiction of an athlete’s dream for greatness. Reflecting the innate human need to be remembered.

In contrast, Sinners is a haunting Southern-Gothic horror film set in the 1930s, against a backdrop of the Klan’s violent racism, intertwined with Gaelic vampire traditions. Michael B. Jordan helms the film, playing a pair of identical twins who return to Mississippi after being away for years. Sinners tackles themes of cultural erasure through the vampire storyline and the prospect of racial transcendence. The story is supported by a score (musical soundtrack) centred on communal memory, where past and present become deeply intertwined, and Arkapaw’s cinematography creates an illusion of floating on ‘the veil between life and death.’ Coogler continues his exploration of the Black experience through themes of freedom and ownership in what may just be his most visceral portrayal of Black identity yet. It is through this Gothic cinematic lens that Sinners delivers a brutally honest depiction of American blackness in an era of vicious oppression.

Michael B. Jordan is given a career defining opportunity with Sinners, where he is tasked with portraying two characters who experience vastly different emotional storylines. Smoke, depicted as the outward-facing sinner, initially takes on a calm demeanour before his sins come to light, leading to a final reckoning. His arc is ultimately tragic, as he is only able to leave behind his old life through death. Stack parallels Smoke as the inward-facing sinner. His journey is internalised as he moves through shame and moral conflict to find purpose. Both characters are tasked with the same question of when they will be ready to face who they really are, which allows Jordan to take the audience on two contrasting emotional journeys. These characters also test Jordan’s acting skills through their strategic command of the space. Smoke is present, decisive and naturally aggressive where Stack carries emotion through silence, centring reactivity and physicalising the moral burden he carries.

Jordan’s significance in black cinema is generational. His ongoing collaboration with Coogler, through the Creed saga and the Black Panther films, continue to centre black voices in stories and genres that have traditionally been exclusively dominated by white ones. Through his career, the actor has challenged racial boundaries and has become a role model for young black men who are still discovering themselves in an increasingly polarising world. Nothing encapsulates this as well as his 2018 interview with Vanity Fair where he said, ‘I’m first and foremost a black man, for sure, but what I’m trying to do, and what I’m trying to represent and build, is universal.’

This awards season, Jordan has faced no other competition like Timothée Chalamet. At the 2025 SAG awards, Chalamet declared ‘The truth is I'm really in the pursuit of greatness… I want to be one of the greats,’ and he has lived up to this claim. His stellar career includes Call Me By Your Name, Beautiful Boy, Little Women, Interstellar, and the Dune trilogy, and has spanned genres and totalled $4.19 billion in box office earnings. 

Marty Supreme is a continuation of this pursuit of greatness. His sharp dialogue fuels the effortlessly chaotic ping-pong matches, and Marty’s egocentrism adds a complexity to his obsession with greatness, testing the audience’s patience at every turn. Khondji’s cinematography matches Chalamet’s kinetic energy, accurately capturing the desperation, agitation, and intensity of each moment.

From a chaotic start with Chalamet’s bold declarations of a career-defining performance, this marketing campaign made it clear that, where Jordan is playing a character, Chalamet is truly living the athlete mentality of Marty Mauser. These different approaches to acting will battle for recognition as the awards season continues.

While Michael B. Jordan may have missed out at the Critics’ Choice Awards, Sinners certainly did not. The film swept up Best Original Screenplay, Best Score, Best Young Actor, and Best Casting & Ensemble, making it one of the most successful films of the year. Outside of the Best Actor category, Sinners has earned awards for its writing, directing, cinematography, and score - all of which reflect a deep creative and emotive style beyond the acting itself. 

Winning these awards signifies prestige. It is a marker of the film’s technical quality, and while audiences often focus on the ‘big three’ award categories, the complete art of cinema emerges in these ‘other’ disciplines. Orson Welles stated that ‘a film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet,’ and composer Cliff Martinez declared ‘when film music is at its best, it expresses the things that the images and the dialogue cannot express,’ highlighting the emotional complexity that the score adds to cinema. 

By dominating these award categories, Sinners demonstrates its cinematic quality. And it is these films with high technical calibre that pass the test of time and assert themselves as the greatest films of the decade. So whilst Jordan himself missed out, Sinners is certainly receiving the critical acclaim it deserves.

With the BAFTAs, SAG Awards, and Oscars still to come, competition between these two films is only going to rise. Will Marty Supreme emerge as a forerunner? Or will Sinners hold its dominance over a packed field? 

As a genre piece, the score, cinematography and screenplay remain worthy of celebration, but due to its strength as an ensemble piece, Jordan simply doesn’t deliver the standout performance that Chalamet was able to with Marty Supreme.