The Golden Globes’ Annual Ritual of Playing in Black Folks’ Faces
We Should’ve Known Better: The Golden Globes’ Annual Ritual of Playing in Black Folks’ Faces
I blame us.
I blame us for believing that a systemic award arm of the motion picture industry was going to do right by us.
I blame us for throwing our full support behind arguably one of the Blackest horror films ever made—showing up en masse, championing a story rooted in the South, in the Blues, in Black memory—and convincing ourselves that a historically white awards body would not only see us this time, but actually acknowledge our existence.
At this point, we are Charlie Brown. Awards shows are Lucy holding the football. No matter how many times she promises she won’t move it, she always does—and we keep lining up to kick it.
Literally.
Sinners didn’t just get snubbed at the Golden Globes, it got disrespected. Sinners was nominated for seven awards:
Best Motion Picture – Drama
Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama (Michael B. Jordan)
Best Director – Motion Picture (Ryan Coogler)
Best Screenplay – Motion Picture (Ryan Coogler)
Best Original Score – Motion Picture (Ludwig Göransson)
Cinematic and Box Office Achievement
Best Original Song – Motion Picture (for “I Lied to You”)
The movie won two: Cinematic and Box Office Achievement and Best Original Score, which wasn’t even televised. Despite going triple platinum in the streets and the court of Black public opinion, the academy refused to reward the Black movie that showed up without permission.
And if we’re being honest, Sinners never had a real chance.
It’s the kind of film that award committees love to praise in theory but then avoid when it comes time to reward them. It was an ambitious, layered, nuanced, unapologetic Black movie that didn’t explain itself to white folks. And Hollywood was never going to reward that.
The love Black pain as long as it’s packaged in ways make white voters feel wise, generous, and morally evolved for watching it. They love a Black slave story that teaches them something about morality that they believe they have. What they don’t love is Black art that doesn’t appease them or gift them ways to feel.
That’s where Sinners ran into trouble.
The Golden Globes are an institution and institutions like to feel safe and Sinners didn’t validate the existing hierarchy, it destroyed it. Institutions reward what they understand and that they approve of, not movies that make them wrestle with what they’ve just watched. Sinners was never going to flatten itself for white approval or do the work for those who refused to get it. Sinners just presented itself to the world and told all those who didn’t get it, or weren’t ready to challenge themselves of their faux-liberal ideologies to catch up.
And Hollywood hates that.
They love Black trauma and directors stamped by the institution that love to create Black trauma porn or historical stories with white saviors. These movies get red carpet treatment, and consideration campaigns that look like military operations.
But Sinners came crashing into the industry sideways: genre-bending, morally complex, aesthetically bold, or culturally specific without apology—it’s treated like a curiosity at best and a problem at worst. Awards voters suddenly become very confused. They “didn’t connect.” They “admire it, but…” They “weren’t sure how to place it.”
That’s code. We know it.
Sinners wasn’t snubbed because it wasn’t good enough. It was snubbed because it refused to sit at the table and just be happy to be there. It didn’t try to morph itself into something other than what it was and that makes Hollywood uncomfortable. It always has.
Sinners’ required emotional nuance and Hollywood loves Black spectacle and the Golden Globes are not a moral compass. They don’t often reward courage as much as complacency. But what makes this snub so hard to handle is this time we all thought it was obvious. How could you have watched the beautifully shot, superbly acted, compelling narrative and not reward this artistry?
Hell, I could write an entire dissertation on the character Remmick and how he was the embodiment of liberal whites; serving as more a mirror for white people than a villain.
But I get it because I still wanted to believe that just this time a Black man would reap all of the benefits from boundary pushing Black stories into the conversation. But I was tricked, too. Not by the Golden Globes but by the belief I still have that one day institutions will do right by us. That at some point the greatness becomes too hard to ignore.
And so I blame us for watching that felony assault on stage. I blame us for continuing to look for white acceptance of Black excellence. I blame us for allowing the Golden Globes to play in our faces without consequence.
Because the truth is, Sinners didn’t lose anything that night. The Golden Globes did. And until we stop lining up to kick Lucy’s football, they’ll keep yanking it away—and calling it tradition.
We Should’ve Known Better: The Golden Globes’ Annual Ritual of Playing in Black Folks’ Faces was originally published on cassiuslife.com
