TV & Movies

… Critics have hailed OBAA as a “deeply humanist story of rebellion.” Proclaim “there is nothing trivial in [PTA’s] portrait of shattered lives and relationships and of an American society shaken to its core.” But I found those claims to be untrue. The film is undeserving of the Oscar for Best Picture, most of all because its portrayal of Black people is somewhere between insidiously problematic and flagrantly anti-Black…

OBAA portends itself a film about a government that has devolved into an authoritarian regime and its relentless persecution of immigrants, about humanity and the measures the people employ to fight oppression. But it’s hollow on those subjects. Beyond showing Bob half-watching The Battle of Algiers at home, Anderson shortchanges the history of revolutionary social movements. Politics are treated with a flippancy that undermines the import of radical action and the people who dare it—the pure antithesis of the message we need now. How could it do anything but fall short of satirizing a regime that has proved near boundless in its violence and corruption and blatant bigotries, that treats contrition as anathema. And if satire ain’t its aim, I can abide even less its antagonism toward my people, not to mention how it trivializes resistance. Plus, the film recapitulates Hollywood’s familiar message: The battle for the fate of America, often synonymous with the fate of the world, is at base a battle between white men, struggles that evermore foreordain a great white savior.

Sinners, the genre-bending horror thriller set in Jim Crow–era Mississippi, centers Blackness. It begins with Sammie (Miles Caton), a young blues-loving sharecropper from Mississippi being recruited by his twin cousins Smoke and Stack (both Michael B. Jordan) to play their brand-new juke joint. On the juke joint’s first night, white vampires surround it and prey on the patrons, setting off a battle for lives and souls…

While OBAA postures at it, Sinners is radical in that there are no white saviors, in that Black people are not the stock sidekicks of courageous white people but heroes at the heart of the film. In fact most of its white characters, including all who first surround the juke joint to prey on its patrons, are depicted as hostile to the Black community (as well as the Asian characters and the mixed woman who are its denizens)… And yet, somehow, Sinners is so soulful that the lead vampire, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), is imbued with more humanity than most of the Black characters in OBAA.

Then there’s the fact that Sinners is just all-around extraordinary movie-making. There’s the originality of Coogler’s Oscar-nominated screenplay. There’s Ludwig Göransson’s superb Oscar-nominated score. There’s the sublime one-shot scene in which Sammie’s singing conjures a journey (in which African times past, present, and future exist all at once) that not only sets the stakes for the main characters but, as Coogler has explained, features “ancestor spirits from both the past and the future” of Black music: African drummers, an electric guitarist, a hip-hop DJ and dancer, even Chinese opera dancers. There’s the indelible Oscar-nominated performance of Michael B. Jordan, a man who became two humans, each intimately connected and miraculously distinct…

Discuss amongst yourselves!