13 years after his feature film debut Fruitvale Station, Oakland native son Ryan Coogler is setting Oscar records with his hit film Sinners, which received 16 nominations for this year's Academy Awards.

The Oscar nominations were announced Thursday morning in Los Angeles, at the traditional 5:30 am ceremony — so that the story can be picked up in the East Coast morning news. And the big headline is that Sinners, Ryan Coogler's genre-mashed allegory about racial violence, has garnered 16 nominations — breaking a record of 14 nominations that had stood for three quarters of a century, set by All About Eve, and tied by Titanic and La La Land.

Among those are acting nods for star Michael B. Jordan — who also starred in Coogler's Fruitvale Station, the 2013 dramatization of the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer — and longtime Bay Area resident Delroy Lindo in the Best Supporting Actor category, for playing blues musician Delta Slim.

Also nominated for the first time is Nigerian-born Wunmi Mosaku for Best Supporting Actress, for playing Sinners' hoodoo priestess Annie.

While Sinners is not, straghtforwardly, a horror film, it includes a heavy dose of vampires and could be lumped in that category, making it a rarity among Oscar contenders. (The great Amy Madigan got a supporting actress nomination this year for a horror film as well, Weapons.)

And Coogler, who gets his first-ever Oscar nomiantion for Best Director today, tells Deadline that all this positive attention for the film has been "pretty crazy."

"I haven’t had a chance to think about it on the genre [issue], but as far as pride in what we made and how we made it, I was so thankful that everybody said yes to this movie," Coogler says. "My partners included, because I knew that the movie on the surface could be read as very strange. And I say that in the best of ways, because I also really love strange movies. Those are the movies that I always admired. And I always admired the bravery of artists that were able to make movies that were kind of undefinable when it came to genre, and scary movies and movies that went there in any particular way."

Coogler, who was born in Oakland in 1986, attended film school at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, out of which Fruitvale Station was born. His parents both graduated from Cal State Hayward, and remain tied to the Oakland community — his mother Joselyn as a community organizer, and his father Ira as a juvenile hall probation counselor. Coogler himself, starting when he was 21, worked with youth as a counselor at San Francisco's Juvenile Probation Department, following in his father's footsteps, as he told ColorLines in 2013.

He remains grateful to everyone who took a chance on Sinners, he said, particularly because after his work on films like Creed and Black Panther, this was a bit of a left turn.

"[I realize I] was not known for making movies with horror elements," he tells Deadline. "So I knew that it would also be maybe some sticker shock that it was coming from me, but to see how my partners wrapped their arms around it and everybody came down to New Orleans and put their lives on hold for a few months to make this thing and gave it their all, that filled me with just an incredible sense of gratitude. And seeing everybody’s contributions up close, I knew the quality of what people were doing."

This year's Oscars, which will take place on March 15, will likely be dominated by two films, unless one makes a sweep. The other, besides Sinners, is Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, a film that also deals with race and the current moment the country is in with immigration. Anderson, a veteran auteur at this point whose films — including Magnolia, The Master, and There Will Be Blood — always attract Oscar buzz, has never won an Oscar himself, despite having three nominations for Best Screenplay, and now four nominations for Best Director.

Top image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - DECEMBER 09: (L-R) Delroy Lindo and Ryan Coogler attend The Critics Choice Association's 8th annual celebration of Black Cinema & Television at Fairmont Century Plaza on December 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Randy Shropshire/Getty Images for Critics Choice Association)