One Battle After Another has long been expected to the be the dominant force in this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, the juggernaut that couldn’t be stopped. Sure enough, today’s announcement of the nominations revealed that Paul Thomas Anderson’s film earned thirteen nods. But, you see, the thing is…Ryan Coogler’s Sinners snared three more.

Sixteen nominations for Sinners is a staggering haul. Even without the addition of a new category this year to help its counting stats, Coogler’s hit becomes the new record holder. This might be some old-school thinking, but I can’t help but feel that this significantly shakes up the Oscar race. Although La La Land famously didn’t win Best Picture and there are plenty of other instances through Oscar history when the most nominated film of a year underperformed at the ceremony, it seems so unlikely that Sinners could be shunted to a second choice by voters now that it has such a prize place in the annals of the Academy.

In the end, this is a good list. By my quick assessment, any expected performers left off the acting rolls are reasonable omissions, and the voters put together a strong, varied Best Picture ten. I think 2025 was a strong year for movies, and the Academy did a fine job assembling what was special about it.

Other thoughts:

—Only three women have ever won the Oscar for directing. Of them, Chloé Zhao becomes the first to earn a follow-up nomination in the category. She’s also only the second woman to get a second nomination in the category. Before she won for The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion was nominated for The Piano almost thirty years earlier.

—Leonardo DiCaprio is up to his seventh acting nomination. In the lineup of Scorsese regulars, he’s now one nomination behind Robert De Niro. Meanwhile, Sean Penn collects his sixth nomination overall and first since he won Best Actor for Milk. Emma Stone reaches five nominations, three of them for movies directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.

—Paul Thomas Anderson picks up his fourth nomination for directing and sixth for writing. I still think he’s the frontrunner, but I could see the narrative switching very rapidly. If Sinners starts to feel undeniable in the top category, I don’t see how Ryan Coogler doesn’t move ahead of Anderson in the voters’ assessments. If Sinners takes Best Picture and Coogler doesn’t win in directing, it’ll be the third time in the past twelve years that such a split happened to a Black director. Steve McQueen lost to Alfonso Cuarón the year that 12 Years a Slave took Best Picture, and Barry Jenkins lost to Damien Chazelle in the infamous Moonlight ceremony. I think Anderson deserves to win and is overdue for such Academy recognition, but if Picture and Directing split that way again, it’s definitely not a good look.

—I’m just going to copy-paste my comment about Diane Warren from last year, adding the only relevant edits needed: Change the adage about inevitability to supplement death and taxes with a Diane Warren Oscar nomination. With today’s announcement, the songwriter is up to sixteen seventeen career nominations, and this is the eighth ninth year in a row she’s been nominated. As has been the case recently, she’s in there for a song that has no discernible cultural footprint for a film that most people, even the most dedicated movie fans, haven’t heard of. She has an honorary Academy Award but has never won in competition. She won’t this year either.

—I’m thrilled that Nick Cave is an Oscar nominee. His song “Train Dreams” slipped into the song category. Let’s get that gloomy intensity onto the Oscar stage.

—I think Teyana Taylor and Jessie Buckley are winning in the actress categories. There are spoilers lurking amongst their fellow nominees, but I think those performances are too strong and comfortably Oscar-friendly, albeit in markedly different ways. Best Actor in a Supporting Role could go so many different ways, but I think the over-performance of Sentimental Value in today’s nominations is a signal that Stellan Skarsgård is likely to win.

—Much as it feels like Timothée Chalamet has been a relentless Oscars presence in recent years, this is only his third nomination. Smart money says he wins, but I’ve long had a sneaking suspicion that the Academy is going to make him wait a little longer. The lead actor category is one of the places where I think the hefty nominations haul for Sinners is going to have an impact. In recent years, Academy voters have regularly carried over their appreciation for the Best Picture winner to the film’s prominent lead acting performance. Think Mikey Madison for Anora, Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer, Michelle Yeoh for Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Frances McDormand for Nomadland. Now they’ve got a guy who’s so dominant in his film that he effectively plays two leading roles. I’m typing it right now: Start taking Michael B. Jordan seriously in that category.