Grief is Not a Genre - So Why is SINNERS Treated Like One?

BY LA'CHRIS ROBINSON JORDAN

JANUARY 18, 2026

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One of the quiet failures in the awards conversation around Sinners is the refusal to engage with its emotional core on its own terms.
 

At the Golden Globe Awards, Sinners was largely sidelined in the categories that signal cultural seriousness (Best Motion Picture-Drama, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay most notably) despite undeniable momentum, critical respect, and a lead performance that carries the film’s emotional weight from the first frame.
 

These omissions matter. Because the dismissal of Sinners wasn’t loud. It was quiet. Surgical. 

Hamnet, which won Best Motion Picture-Drama, has been widely embraced as an elevated meditation on loss, mourning, and absence. Sinners is also about grief. Deeply. Relentlessly.
 

Michael B. Jordan plays Smoke, a man already shattered before the supernatural ever arrives. His son’s death hangs over every decision, every silence, every compromised choice. The vampires don’t cause his unraveling,  they collide with it. Jordan’s performance is built on interiority, restraint, and accumulated loss. And yet, it was treated as if it didn’t belong in the same room as the Globes’ idea of “serious acting.” (Best Actor went to Timothée Chalamet for Marty Supreme)
 

So the uncomfortable question becomes: is one kind of grief considered more legitimate than another? Is grief only “award-worthy” when it arrives quietly, wrapped in period costumes and literary reverence?
 

Sinners is a historical period film. It does feature meticulous costuming (shout out to Ruth Carter). And unlike Hamnet, it is an original screenplay (serious nod to Ryan Coogler), not an adaptation. Yet Smoke’s grief is loud, embodied, and dangerous. It lives in his body and choices. It doesn’t ask to be observed gently; it demands to be reckoned with.
 

This is where nuance gets lost. Sinners doesn’t sentimentalize grief. It weaponizes it, interrogates it, and lets it shape the narrative’s moral spine. That complexity is not lesser than Hamnet’s. It’s simply less familiar to institutions that still struggle to see genre films - especially horror - as vessels for human truth.
 

So I had to ask myself: Is the issue that Sinners lacks depth? Or that the Golden Globes still struggle to see depth when it lives inside genre?
 

The Best Picture and other category snubs confirms it. Horror remains acceptable at the Globes as spectacle or craft, but not as an emotional thesis. Grief is honored when it is quiet and classical, not when it is embodied, dangerous, and unresolved. That’s not a failure of Sinners. That’s a failure of imagination.