The 98th Academy Awards, held on March 15 in Los Angeles, delivered a landmark night for African and African-American creative talent, with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners winning four Oscars from a record 16 nominations and a Tunisian director making history with her third consecutive Academy Award nomination. The ceremony was dominated by two Warner Bros. films: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which won Best Picture and five other awards, and Sinners, which took four prizes rooted in the celebration of African-American culture and history.
- Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for his dual performance as twin brothers Smoke and Stack in Sinners, a period horror film set in the 1932 Mississippi Delta that explores the origins of blues music, African-American spirituality, and the cultural heritage of the African diaspora in America. It was Jordan’s first Oscar win.
- Ryan Coogler won Best Original Screenplay for Sinners, becoming only the second Black writer to win in the category after Jordan Peele, who won in 2018 for Get Out. Coogler, who also directed and produced the film, drew extensively on his family’s roots in the Mississippi Delta and the Great Migration narrative to write the screenplay.
- Autumn Durald Arkapaw won Best Cinematography for Sinners, becoming the first woman and the first woman of colour ever to win the award in the category’s nearly 100-year history. Her win for a film that visually celebrated Black Southern culture made the milestone doubly significant.
- Ludwig Göransson won Best Original Score for Sinners, his third career Oscar. The score drew directly from Delta blues traditions, West African Yoruba spiritual themes embedded in the film’s hoodoo narrative, and original tracks including I Lied to You, co-written with Raphael Saadiq.
- Wunmi Mosaku, a British-Nigerian actress born in Nigeria, received her first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Annie, a hoodoo priestess and healer in Sinners. Mosaku, who studied ancestral Yoruba traditions to prepare for the role, did not win. The award went to Amy Madigan for Weapons. Her nomination marked a significant moment for Nigerian representation at the Academy Awards.
- Kaouther Ben Hania, the Tunisian filmmaker, received her third consecutive Oscar nomination for Best International Feature Film for The Voice of Hind Rajab, a docudrama about a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza in 2024. Her three back-to-back nominations make her the first Arab woman in Oscar history to achieve this. The film premiered at Venice with a 22-minute standing ovation but did not win. The award went to Norway’s Sentimental Value. Its reach and cultural impact extended well beyond the ceremony.
Sinners entered the ceremony with a record 16 nominations, surpassing the previous record jointly held by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land. The film grossed nearly $370 million globally on a $90 million budget, making it one of the highest-grossing original films in 15 years. At its thematic core, Sinners is a film about the African roots of American culture: the twins at its centre represent the Marassa divine twins of West African Yoruba and Haitian Vodou tradition, the blues music it celebrates traces directly to African sonic and spiritual heritage, and Ryan Coogler has spoken extensively about the film as a reclamation of African-American cultural identity.
Bigger Picture: The 2026 Oscars represent the most significant moment for African and African-connected talent in the Academy’s recent history. Four Oscars for Sinners, a film explicitly built on African diasporic culture, signal that Hollywood’s mainstream awards infrastructure is beginning to recognise the commercial and artistic weight of stories rooted in African heritage, not just African-American history. For the continent itself, Kaouther Ben Hania’s three consecutive nominations from Tunisia demonstrate that African filmmaking is capable of sustained world-class output that reaches the highest tier of global cinema. Africa’s creative industries are generating cultural assets with genuine international reach. The next frontier is ensuring that the investment infrastructure, distribution networks, and ownership structures exist to let African creators capture the economic value that their stories are demonstrably creating.
Sources: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences / AllAfrica / Premium Times / OkayAfrica
