As this year’s Oscar nominations rolled out this morning, I told my boyfriend that Sinners, with 16 noms in total, had made history. “Woke is back,” he replied.
He was joking (don’t come for him!), but his quip highlights a pretty stark dichotomy. Last year, as everyone from President Donald Trump down harped on about the perils of DEI, the biggest cultural breakthroughs—Sinners, KPop Demon Hunters, Heated Rivalry, One Battle After Another—all showcased diversity in fresh ways. And it succeeded. These works weren’t just popular among leftists or critics, they were bona fide cultural phenomena.
Sinners, a horror movie set in the Jim Crow South, used vampires as a metaphorical device to explore systemic racism and cultural theft—and director Ryan Coogler scored a feat in his deal with Warner Bros. that gives him the rights to the film in 25 years. KPop Demon Hunters, a story by a female Korean-Canadian director who’d been waiting over a decade for her chance to direct a feature, placed a huge emphasis on authenticity and brought the already-massive subculture around K-pop even more into the mainstream. Heated Rivalry, a small Canadian television production picked up by HBO, had an extremely subversive take on hockey by chronicling the horny-yet-poignant love story between two closeted pro players. And One Battle After Another—decried by conservative commentators who felt it lionized left-wing violence—offered complicated views on motherhood and activism while skewering ICE-like agent Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw and his desperate attempts to fit in with other racists.
In a year when the White House issued multiple executive orders doing away with DEI programs in the federal government, the successes of those projects felt like a form of resistance. Corporate media followed Trump’s suit, with Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon, Paramount Global, and Disney all reportedly scaling back on their diversity efforts. Skydance, founded by David Ellison, son of billionaire Trump supporter Larry Ellison, acquired Paramount, which briefly removed Jimmy Kimmel from the air due to his joke about Charlie Kirk supporters and gave CBS News a seemingly conservative makeover. Meanwhile, shows that offered red meat in the form of farmers, grumpy MAGA adherents, cowboys, and Christian values were greenlit and promoted.
“There is a feeling from … this administration that the only stories that matter are stories of straight white men, and that is just simply not the case,” says Jenni Werner, executive artistic director of the New Harmony Project, which develops theater, film, and TV projects and says it is committed to anti-oppressive and anti-racist values.
“Audiences want to feel transformed. You want to be able to sit down and watch something, whether it’s in your home or in a theater, that takes you into a new place and maybe gives you a new understanding of something.” She adds that she has faith that artists will keep making “boundary pushing work,” even if it keeps getting harder.
Even before Trump’s second term, trying to get out-of-the-box stories made in Hollywood has been a slog. According to UCLA’s Hollywood Diversity Report, released in December, nearly 80 percent of directors of theatrical movies in 2024 were white, along with about 75 percent of leading actors.
The report also suggests this discrepancy is leaving money on the table, noting that BIPOC moviegoers “were overrepresented as ticketbuyers for films that had casts of more than 20 percent BIPOC.” Sinners grossed $368 million at the box office, a feat that puts it in the “horror hall of fame,” per The New York Times.
