Writer-director Ryan Coogler has won his first Oscar for his original screenplay for "Sinners". It's the film's first win at the ceremony, out of the record 16 nominations it received already.
Coogler was nominated five times before as a producer for "Black Panther", "Judas and the Black Messiah", and "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever", and for co-writing the song "Lift Me Up" from "Wakanda Forever".
Coogler is the second Black screenwriter to win the Original Screenplay trophy, after Jordan Peele for "Get Out" in 2018.
Other nominees in the Original Screenplay category were Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie for "Marty Supreme", Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier for "Sentimental Value", and Robert Kaplow for "Blue Moon".
In "Sinners", Coogler weaved a genre-blending tale of twins with different personalities (both played by Michael B. Jordan) battling a supernatural menace while trying to establish their new enterprise. In its piece on the film, THE WEEK wrote: "'Sinners' is about characters yearning to feel liberated and independent, in the form of the twins with different personalities, played by Michael B Jordan. It also happens to be a coming-of-age drama, and this realisation hits only a while after we have completed the film, including the mid and post-credits scenes. Writer-director Ryan Coogler's weaving of multiple genres and themes is so remarkable that it takes a while to get some sense of the film's overall behaviour and intentions. We see gangsters. We see white supremacists. We see Blues musicians. We see mystics. We see preachers. We see vampire hunters. We see Black people feeling empowered."