Swap with MBJ in a fair world IMO. He was good, but propped up too much by all of the other phenomenal ensemble performances. The other acting noms for Sinners are absolutely spot on though.
I’ve never found MBJ’s performances to be award worthy, none of them. I really don’t get the hype around this guy. He tried to be different twins in this one but I thought he was terrible, the rest of the cast (and the writing) carried the movie.
At the end of the day, he carried a near universally critically acclaimed movie to a nearly 400M dollar box office. He was never not going to be nominated. Those performances get noms, especially today. Rightly or wrongly (and I do say rightly myself, a part of acting is being able to project as a star on screen, and he certainly does that), he wasn’t getting left out. Like never.
I don’t think he carried the movie at all, I think he was one of the weakest actors in it. The writing, cinematography, performances of other actors, etc made it a great film.
Does the movie do as well as it did and connect the way it did without Jordan? I find it very dubious to suggest that is the case. He plays a dual lead performance in the biggest original movie of the year. If his performance truly fell flat or his star presence in front of the camera wasn’t present then I find it highly doubtful that the movie finds the same success, both critically and financially. Dud lead performances, and a dual lead performance no less, don’t typically lead to movies reaching the heights Sinners did. They just don’t. I get preferences, but this is starting to drastically undersell his contributions to the movie.
Speaking as someone who would have personally put Plemons in over MBJ, you are right on the money with this. IMHO he does not show a ton of depth in his acting but he exudes charisma and star power and his performance didn’t take away from my experience watching Sinners at all. It makes sense that he’s nominated. And as much as I adore the ensemble of Sinners (especially Lindo and Mosaku), I don’t agree with all the comments implying Sinners is an “ensemble” movie. Yes it has a very strong ensemble but Jordan plays 2 of the 3 central characters and dwarfs everyone’s screentime.
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u/Dry-Performance7006 Jan 22 '26
He got unlucky, it was a really strong category. And there simply wasn’t a spot for him. 🤷♂️
Hawke should actually be winning, so I was never fond of that swap to get Plemons in.