The following article is an excerpt from the new edition of “IndieWire’s The Lead Up,” a weekly newsletter in which our Awards Editor Marcus Jones takes readers on the awards trail, interviewing key figures responsible for some of the most compelling stories of the season, and offering predictions on who will win. Subscribe here to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday.
I’m about as interested in writing another article about the 2026 Oscars as you all are probably interested in reading it. But before I let a sleeping dog lie, I do want to address a lightning rod topic that has been of personal interest to me for a very long time.
The very first awards screener I ever watched was a DVD copy of Ryan Coogler’s “Fruitvale Station” that my supervisor let me borrow when I was interning at a magazine. That was during the same Oscars season during which “12 Years a Slave” filmmaker Steve McQueen became the first Black director to helm a Best Picture winner.
I started writing about entertainment on a more regular basis the following fall, right before the first awards season when #OscarsSoWhite went viral. That outrage would happen all over again the next year, right before I entered the workforce full-time; my first job interview was about how I would cover the whole “The Birth of a Nation” debacle. My first time in the newsroom covering the Oscars was for “Moonlight”/”La La Land,” my first Sundance saw me talk my way into the secret world premiere of “Get Out,” et cetera, et cetera.
My little “Forrest Gump” journey through covering diversity at the Oscars, as it pertains to Black Hollywood, has meant that I’ve been the one on staff who’s pre-written the “X Becomes First Black Filmmaker to Win the Oscar for Best Director” article multiple times, across several publications. And as the 98th year of the Academy Awards comes to a close, I still have never gotten the chance to publish any of them.
But it would be disingenuous to say that inside the Dolby Theatre last Sunday, March 15, I was predicting that “Sinners” director Ryan Coogler would be the one to make history. That ship sailed with the DGA Awards results, for reasons in which I elaborated on directly afterwards. I am not at all of the opinion that Paul Thomas Anderson is undeserving of his Oscars for his work on “One Battle After Another.”
The reason why I still harp on it though is that I’ve heard a couple people mention that Coogler is the same age as Paul Thomas Anderson when he lost the first Best Director Oscar he was nominated for to the Coen Brothers the year their respective films, “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country For Old Men,” were caught in a similar awards race, being two Oscar frontrunners from the same studio. Their implication is that Coogler is on the same trajectory. He is owed a Best Director Oscar one day.
However, I’ve also seen others push back on that, noting that no Black director has ever been nominated for the Best Director Oscar twice, so judging by precedent, there is no way another Best Director nomination is guaranteed to Coogler — especially since he did just win an Oscar already for Best Original Screenplay (as did his three most recent predecessors in the category, Jordan Peele, Spike Lee, and Barry Jenkins).
Ever the optimist, my take on this falls somewhere in the middle. Yes, Coogler deserves all kudos for being a skilled arbiter of Black culture on the silver screen, but his achievements as a director feel minimized to conversations about representation, and that’s not always warranted.
All four films that he’s made since “Fruitvale Station” have been nominated for Oscars, and more importantly, he has been the director establishing the new guard for several filmmaking disciplines. Composer Ludwig Göransson has won two of his three Best Original Score Oscars for his work on Coogler’s films. Same goes for Ruth E. Carter and her two Best Costume Design Oscars for the “Black Panther” films, making her the first Black woman in any category to win two Oscars. His go-to production designer Hannah Beachler is the first Black woman to win the Oscar for Best Production Design, and after working with cinematographer Rachel Morrison shortly before she became the first woman nominated for Best Cinematography, Coogler’s latest director of photography, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, became the first woman to win the Best Cinematography Oscar for her work on “Sinners.”
Comparing Coogler to Steven Spielberg, an era-defining filmmaker, is not only apt because of how they both have a strong track record of making tentpole films that still have the highest artistic merit, but because they both are also the maestros that assemble below-the-line collaborators that become leaders in their field, like Spielberg associates John Williams and Janusz Kamiński.
That is the legacy that I believe will propel Coogler to an overdue Best Director Oscar. “Sinners” breaking the record for most Oscar-nominated film of all time speaks to that. Several Academy branches take notice any time he puts out a film. His work is undeniably reshaping what constitutes an “Oscar movie” in the eyes of his industry peers who vote for the Academy Awards. The same could be said of Spielberg, who took nearly 20 years to finally win Best Director, after having made everything from “Jaws” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “The Color Purple.”
Now, do I think a third “Black Panther,” reportedly his next film, will be the project that leads Coogler toward finally being the one to make history as the first Black filmmaker to win the Oscar for Best Director? No. But, again, part of his brilliance is consistently proving our preconceived notions about these things wrong.
