It's the Monday after the Academy Awards, so the internet is full of roundups of the best, worst, and most surprising moments from this year's ceremony. It would sort of be standard procedure for me to do something similar, but instead I'm going to zoom in and, instead of rounding up a bunch of moments, just talk about one.
It came midway through the program, when Autumn Durald Arkapaw won the Best Cinematography Oscar for her work on Sinners, becoming simultaneously the first woman and the first Black person to win that particular statuette. It was a history-making moment, a shattered glass ceiling which saw the entire room rise to give Arkapaw a standing ovation.
But when Arkapaw got to the stage, before doing anything else, before commemorating her place in Oscar history, she asked about her son, Aidan.
This is not itself a remarkable thing. Oscar winners seek out family members in the crowd all the time. Michael B. Jordan, who took Best Actor later in the evening, thanked his mother in the front row, then called out for his father as he sat somewhere else in the theater. It's what you do when you're lucky enough to have your family along for the ride on what might be the biggest night of your professional life. What made it particularly remarkable is what happened next.
Usually, if your family's in the back of the room, your family's just...in the back of the room, shouting and waving and cheering but otherwise keeping their seats. But in Arkapaw's moment, breaking new ground for women in her field all over the world, that just wouldn't do, and so Sinners director Ryan Coogler personally sprinted to the back of the theater, grabbed young Aidan, and ran him down to the front of the room to sit with the rest of the Sinners cast and crew, so he could see his mother's moment up close.
This is, ultimately, a small detail in the broadcast, and it was quickly eclipsed by Arkapaw's wonderful speech, in which she acknowledged her forebears, praised Coogler, and even asked every woman in the room to stand up and share in her victory. It was truly one of the night's best speeches, but I keep going back to what happened right before it: Arkapaw wanted to see her kid, and Coogler helped her get there, completing the moment like they always do as friends and collaborators.
You hear a lot on awards show stages about the bond between the cast and crew of a film, a bond that presumably deepens when that cast and crew takes on the awards circuit press and event gauntlet together. The word "family" is thrown around quite a bit, but because awards season is also always about presentation and style and, well, campaigning for awards with the right tone, it's easy to dismiss so much of it as posturing. It's easy to forget that these are people who deeply care not just about their craft, but about each other.
The Sinners cast (and the One Battle After Another team sitting nearby) didn't let us forget that for a single moment on Sunday night. They were endlessly exuberant, celebrating their film, each other, and their fellow nominees. They were often overcome with joy, and I lost count of the number of times Coogler raised his hands in the American Sign Language gestures for "I love you" and "thank you," whether he was addressing a member of his team or someone who beat him for an award. When Arkapaw won, for a brief moment, it was the biggest and best moment in all of their lives, exemplified by Coogler's efforts to go get Arkapaw's son and put him not just close to his mother, but close to the entire Sinners family. Moments like this crack the appearance of careful orchestration and decorum that so guides many awards show, and they're worthy of spotlighting, particularly in the case of a film like Sinners.
While it's a tremendously effective piece of historical horror about the vampiric lust for draining out Black joy and experience in the Jim Crow South, Sinners is also, paradoxically and miraculously, a film about the triumph of that joy. It's a movie in which Coogler and his collaborators stand up against an ageless, ceaseless evil and choose to fight, to live, and to endure. It's a movie that says "We have Seen Some Shit, and We are Still Here," and while it takes place in a make-believe version of our real world, its message rings true like freshly tuned strings on an old Dobro.
On Sunday night, a Black filmmaker ran to the back of the room to get another Black filmmaker's son so he could watch his mother make history, not because it was expected, but because it was true to who these people are. It was true, and those are the moments we hope for when we tune into things like this. We want the glamor, and the gold, and the glory, but more than anything we want to see not just celebration, but fulfillment. In one extraordinary small moment, thanks to Ryan Coogler and Autumn Durald Arkapaw, we got it, in a way I'll never forget.
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