Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s critically and commercially acclaimed supernatural thriller, has become the first film to be nominated for 16 Academy Awards.

The film starring Michael B Jordan as twin brothers setting up a blues club in 1930s Mississippi while battling racism and vampires has so far taken $368m worldwide. It is nominated for trophies including best picture, director, leading actor, supporting actor (for the British actor Delroy Lindo), supporting actress (for British-Nigerian actor Wunmi Mosaku) and the Academy’s inaugural casting prize.

The film’s nod for costume design also makes Ruth E Carter – now nominated five times overall – the most-nominated Black woman throughout the Oscars’ 97-year history. Meanwhile Sinners’ cinematography nomination for Autumn Durald Arkapaw marks only the fourth time a woman has ever been up for the award.

Speaking to Deadline, Coogler said he was surprised to find multiple family members on his Los Angeles doorstep soon after 5am, in anticipation of the announcement. “My dad was keeping count next to me,” he said. “And when he said [it was 16], I was like, ‘Dad, you got it wrong. There’s no way it’s that many.’”

Since news stories appeared verifying the number, said Coogler, his father “has been gleefully pointing out how right he was: ‘So you trust the articles, you don’t trust my counting?’”

Sinners’ multiple nods mean it smashes the record of 14 nominations shared by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997) and La La Land (2016). But while those films converted their nominations into a substantial number of wins (six, 11 and six, respectively), the expectation is that Coogler’s drama may end up with a smaller haul come 15 March.

So far this season, ramshackle countercultural comedy One Battle After Another has dominated in the awards, and at the Oscars it closely trails Sinners, with 13 nominations.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, a veteran Oscars bridesmaid with 11 prior nominations but no wins, is widely predicted to scoop both best picture and best director, with supporting actress Teyana Taylor also tipped to win in her category. Three of the film’s other stars were also nominated – Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro – although Chase Infiniti was a surprise omission from the leading actress shortlist, while Song Sung Blue’s Kate Hudson did make the cut.

Meanwhile Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet also performed well, with eight nominations, including for Jessie Buckley – the easy frontrunner in the best actress category – although Paul Mescal was a surprise snub in the supporting actor category.

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter after the announcement, Buckley said she was disappointed her co-star had not been nominated along with her. “I think he’s extraordinary in this film,” she said. “I know I’ve met a partner for life in doing this with him … There’s no part of what I created or what we created in this story which exists without Paul and what he poured into this story.”

Zhao also edited, executive produced and co-wrote the Maggie O’Farrell adaptation, and is Anderson’s key rival in the adapted screenplay race (Coogler, her former film school classmate, is odds-on for original screenplay).

In 2021, Zhao became the second woman (and first of colour) to win the best director Oscar in 2021 for Nomadland; this year she is the only female director on the shortlist, alongside Anderson, Coogler, Joachim Trier for Sentimental Value and Josh Safdie for Marty Supreme, which took a better-than-expected nine nominations.

The star of that film, Timothée Chalamet, is favourite to take the best actor prize for his turn as a table tennis hustler in postwar New York. Chalamet narrowly missed out on the Oscar last year, when his portrayal of Bob Dylan was pipped by The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody. Should he prove victorious, Chalamet – who turned 30 last month – will become the second youngest best actor winner ever, behind Brody’s 2003 win for The Pianist.

But there was less good news for Chalamet’s Marty Supreme co-star Gwyneth Paltrow, whose return to cinema after a 10-year Goop hiatus did not result in a nomination. Other stars who will be disappointed by Thursday’s announcement include Dwayne Johnson and Sydney Sweeney, both of whom went on transformative journeys for sports biopics The Smashing Machine and Christy, as well as George Clooney and Cynthia Erivo.

Wicked: For Good underperformed across the board, scoring zero nods – including missing out on a widely anticipated supporting actress mention for Ariana Grande – while Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, which stars Clooney as a movie star reassessing his life choices, also came away empty-handed.

Instead, the spread of nominations this year reflected the Academy’s increasing internationalism, with subtitled films such as Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent and It Was Just An Accident named in multiple categories.

Sentimental Value emerged especially strongly with a total of nine nominations, including four acting nods – for Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård – as well as a best picture and best director mention for Trier.

Meanwhile The Secret Agent star Wagner Moura has become the first Brazilian up for the best actor Oscar; the film is also nominated for casting, international feature film and best picture. The nods for Moura, Reinsve, Lilleaas and Skarsgård (Fanning speaks only English in the film) sets a new record for foreign-language acting nominees.

Such success continues the trend that began in 2020 with Parasite’s multiple victories and was again witnessed last year with strong showings at the shortlist stage for I’m Still Here and Emilia Pérez (Sean Baker’s Anora ultimately went on to sweep the board).

More than a quarter of the almost 11,000 voters now hail from outside the US, and the overall demographic breakdown is much more diverse than it was a decade ago. A 2014 survey conducted by the Los Angeles Times found that the average age of Oscar voters was 63, 76% were men and 94% white. Ten years later, energetic measures to overhaul that profile – including almost doubling the numbers – mean that at least 35% of the voters identify as women and at least 25% are from ethnic minorities.

Thursday’s nominations are already a victory for studio Warner Bros, currently the target of a takeover by Netflix, and whose slate last year included both Sinners and One Battle After Another, as well as Superman and Weapons. The studio has 30 nominations this year, 12 more than its closest competitors Netflix and Neon, who both earned 18 nods.

The second tranche of Oscar voting begins on 26 February, and involves a newly introduced measure to ensure voters view all nominated films within a category before they can cast a vote in the final round.

The ceremony takes place on 15 March and will again be hosted by Conan O’Brien. Three weeks before, the Baftas will be distributed in a ceremony overseen by incoming MC Alan Cumming; nominations for those awards are unveiled next Tuesday.

One Battle After Another and Hamnet were the big winners at the Golden Globe awards earlier this week, but the division of those prizes into drama and musical or comedy categories traditionally makes them an unreliable Oscars bellwether.

• This article was amended on 22 January 2026 to name Joachim Trier as one of the the five nominees for best director, for his film Sentimental Value; not Guillermo del Toro, for Frankenstein, as stated in an earlier version.