Ryan Coogler’s Sinners broke every Oscar nominations record. But a damning new UCLA study says Hollywood is quietly moving backward on diversity. Here’s what the numbers actually say.
Ryan Coogler could make history this Sunday. The 39-year-old Oakland native is nominated for Best Director at the 98th Academy Awards — and if he wins, he will be the first Black filmmaker to hold that award in the ceremony’s nearly century-long history. The odds are conspicuously in his favor: Sinners, his supernatural drama set in 1930s Mississippi, shattered the all-time Oscar nominations record with 16 nods, surpassing the previous high of 14 shared by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land.
The film’s nomination list reads like a roll call of firsts. Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman of color — and the first Filipino woman — ever nominated in her category. Costume designer Ruth E. Carter secured her fifth nomination, making her the most-nominated Black woman in Oscar history, surpassing Viola Davis. Producers Zinzi Coogler, Ryan’s wife and longtime collaborator, and Ryan himself became the first Black married couple ever jointly nominated for Best Picture, with Zinzi additionally making history as the first Filipino producer in that category. Ryan Coogler joins a sobering, exclusive group: just the seventh Black filmmaker ever nominated for Best Director.
“I read it, and I was like, ‘Damn, that’s historic,'” Carter told E! Online. “As much as I am telling historic stories, I’m also making my own historic story, and that’s what it felt like.”
A USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study found that just 2 percent of all Oscar nominees and 2 percent of all winners between 1929 and 2025 were Black — 274 nominations and 63 winners across 97 years. Sinners lands as a blunt, record-smashing rebuttal to that history.
“I did not have any expectations when it came to the recognition of what they [the team] did,” Coogler told Deadline. “For me, people just showing up to the movies and having a good time, that would’ve been enough. That is worth all the effort. But that people would consider the craft and the achievements that went into it individually. It’s so rewarding.”
Hollywood’s diversity backslide
Sinners’ moment is unambiguous. But a new UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report — a deep dive into 2025’s theatrical releases — complicates the industry’s self-congratulatory narrative considerably. Representation regressed sharply. Women in lead roles dropped to 37.1 percent, a slide of roughly 10 percentage points from the prior year, when the industry had nearly reached gender parity. Women directed just 10.1 percent of the biggest films of 2025, down from 15.4 percent the year before and the lowest share since 2018. Two-thirds of the top films featured casts that were majority male, with White men alone accounting for half of all lead actors.
“Aside from the impact on the box office, the increasing erasure of women in front of and behind the camera among the top theatrical releases should be concerning to all,” said Ana-Christina Ramón, director of the Entertainment and Media Research Initiative at UCLA and co-founder of the report series.
“Looking back, we can see that recent gains have been largely cosmetic or tenuous,” added Jade Abston, a UCLA doctoral candidate in cinema media studies and co-author of the study. “It’s like the progress women experienced disappeared.”
The picture for people of color was equally discouraging. Studios continued to underinvest even as the market data made the case plainly. “Filmmakers of color usually have to prove themselves for years before they are hired to direct a film that will have a wide-theatrical release with a decent budget,” Ramón said. “Then, if the film succeeds at the box office, the media frames it as surprising or an anomaly. However, the success of those films is just proof of why this investment is warranted and should be increased at all budget levels for filmmakers of color.”
Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost, connected the backslide directly to the broader political moment. “Each year, we challenge the industry to break out of old patterns,” he said. “But as the country experiences a powerful blowback against diversity, the studios have relapsed into a colorblind complacency.” His forecast is blunt: “We are almost guaranteed more downward trends. Not just for diversity and gender parity in film, but also for the industry’s success.”
All of which makes Sinners’ commercial performance that much harder to dismiss. Films with diverse casts consistently outperformed their less diverse counterparts at both domestic and global box offices, according to the same UCLA report. Sinners grossed nearly $370 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing original domestic film in 15 years — a benchmark not reached since Nolan’s Inception. The audience showed up. The studios, broadly, did not.
The weight of the opportunity
For Coogler, the awards conversation is secondary to what filmmaking actually represents. “My award is the opportunity to have this job,” he told Variety. “The opportunity to go write a script, get a crew together, hire union jobs, contribute to people’s health care, insurance and their families.”
For Michael B. Jordan, whose career-best dual performance as twin brothers Smoke and Stack earned him his first Oscar nomination, the film’s recognition reads as a form of collective vindication. “To be a part of a project that will live in cinema history right up there with the movies that have inspired me as an artist — it is really a surreal feeling,” Jordan told Deadline, “and it’s a testament to the movie, to every piece of the puzzle that went into making this film.” At the Actor Awards earlier this month, he was similarly overcome: “I’m so honored and privileged to be nominated in categories with people, actors and humans that I love. I love their work and what you contribute to our craft. This ride has been unbelievable.”
The 98th Oscars air Sunday, March 15, on ABC, hosted by Conan O’Brien. Whatever the outcome, the record books are already different. Sinners was made — and seen — and the industry will have to reckon with what that means. As for the man at the center of it all, he seems exactly like someone who knows where to place his attention. “I’m just trying to enjoy the days as they come, stay present in the moment,” Coogler told the Associated Press. “When Sunday comes, man, I’m pull up and enjoy celebrating all the movies that’s being celebrated here, including our own.”
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