Irish Coffee: We Brought This With Us From Home

Hello!

Tonight is the Oscars, and while I've actually been agonising over this specific cup of tea for a month, I figured it would be better to simply put something out before we learn whether the Academy loves Black art or not (but come on, the answer is not a spoiler.)

Without further ado, here's the tea!

Going Where You're Invited

I am several years older than the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album.

It is also true that I am barely much younger than the Best Rap Performance Grammy, the sole award for the entire category of music at that time, and one that was not televised in its first ceremony appearance in 1989 despite several of its nominees being some of the most popular music on the airwaves—and one of its nominees, Kool Moe Dee, literally performing that evening. The lack of grace with which The Recording Academy dealt with the category was so notorious that despite earning their very first Grammy nom, Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff led a boycott of the ceremony to raise awareness of all the ways the media industry devalues Black art.

Every awards season (even in my own line of work) I spare a little thought for these truths. There is often so little room for respecting and honouring not only Black art on its own terms, but its contributions to what we consider the canons of the artforms in which they operate. So much of what counts as respect in these spaces is so recent as to have only come in fandom's recent history. Even when the people agree that something is undeniable, actually giving Black artists their lowers often has to struggle against industry pushback as well as the constructed bias that slowly runs within the community.

It's what I'm thinking of as Ryan Coogler makes history again at the Oscars with his runaway hit original motion picture Sinners. The film has earned sixteen nominations for this year's ceremony—the record for the most nominations for a single film—including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Coogler's first ever Oscar nomination for Best Director. Coogler had already made a name for himself within both film and science fiction fandom for Black Panther, not only a similarly lauded film from within the community but also for breaking a streak of its own: directing the first motion picture based on a comic book superhero property to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. If anyone has the juice, it has consistently been proven that it's him.

But knowing this doesn't make the moment any more fraught. Every Oscar season is a challenging one, with heavy hitters in most every category, but I can safely say this year there is no movie I can claim to care about anywhere near as much in the Best Picture category as Sinners. All taste is bias, but I'd argue very few in the category gets away with having as much to say, and saying it all as clearly, as Coogler's film does—not just about fear, or just about Black history, but about the art and artistry of Black creation overall, of owning an art form because it gives you joy and community and a sense of self, of wanting to share it with the people who get you and tell the stories that are truest to your existence, only for whiteness to come drooling for it outside your door and seek any way to claim it from you without giving you the credit that you are due.

So much ink had been spilled in the middle of 2025 about whether Sinners deserved to be as lauded as it was. Critics and viewers were eager to give it at least the reasonable praise of being a successful original property in an age of franchises, a strong vampire story that breathed new sociocultural life in elements of the creature's mythology that often go unremarked upon, and a damn good deal in a time where creators are often undercut by executives. And yet film media was unwilling to also admit that it was succeeding for its type, instead always underselling it compared to other releases around that period.

I would argue that this is by design. For one thing, we can clearly observe the complicated space that Black art holds within the cultural frame: novel enough to be worthy of intrigue, but the risk that some brands would rather not incur actually investing in Black creators is apparently too steep to ensure that lightning ever strikes twice.

For another, it seems increasingly similarly apparent that a percentage of the Academy is bored of movies. Members are still interested in seeing whether the big names bring something to bear for Best Picture, it seems, and at least they're willing to put on airs for whatever arthouse stuff makes it in the larger categories, but they will literally forego voting overall once they believe there is a greater threshold of anything else to have to watch. An international film that isn't from one of the nine or ten darlings of modern cinema? Having to care about set or costume from a movie that is obviously speculative? Being invested in any animated movie other than the thing my kids already saw and claimed to like? No thanks—I would rather not watch movies if I can help it.

Of course, we are mere hours away from learning whether this pattern will repeat; you will probably be reading this after we have learned the answer. But a truth remains regardless: structures are not what supports, defends, or sustains Black art. Audiences do. Watching, sharing, being loud nerds about the stories that nourish us and give us joy, speaks more loudly than the bare-faced complacency of powerful systems.

Consider this: if the people who don't want you to have a seat at the table don't even eat when they sit, why would you want to join them? If the systems erected to potentially value art have been devolved into producers seeking to claim any available market share of a good idea but members of the Academy being exhausted by the act of watching movies, why would it matter to you what they think about your work, so long as you find any way through or around or without them to make it?

Sinners is a meaningful movie in part because it is about the inherent tension of making space in dangerous terrain. It takes one of the core elements of the vampire mythos—the permission a creature needs to enter foreign space—and crafts from it a passionate metaphor about struggling for belonging for the mortals surrounded by that violence. It matters that the Smokestack Twins don't ask for permission to make their own space to share community with their kin. It matters that those who do—who cater to a false assumption of decorum, kindness, and camaraderie—really seek to lay claim to the things they think are valuable waiting for them inside those spaces. And it matters that what results is violence that can only be undone when true artisans are willing to wield the tools of their art as a weapon against that control, but that the fight itself is always a long and painful one to wage.

I hope that Sinners wins a bag of Oscars. I hope that one of them includes Best Picture, and I hope that another definitely includes Wunmi Mosaku for Best Supporting Actress. I hope that when you read this, you can say that I got my wish.

But what is more important is that I hope that tomorrow, when the next outstanding example of Black filmmaking hits theatres, the support that it gets from the people who actually care is something that critics cannot diminish. I hope that people see tomorrow that we go where we are invited, and we actually fucking eat.

Tasting Notes

Two quick ones:

The inimitable F.D. Signifier made a video about Sinners and some of the struggles that Black film has to go up against in order to make space for itself in system spaces that is kinda long but definitely worth your attention:

But as a palate cleanser, one of the many examples of how thoughtful and deliberate Ryan Coogler is as a filmmaker and how his love of craft is also a love of tools, I feel like if you haven't heard Coogler talk about the resource-level part of the work, he did a video with Kodak about aspect ratios and the various screening formats available at American cinemas to watch Sinners. His attachment to his instruments, his curiosity about playing with format, and his astute awareness of other developments in cinematography comes out in how he simply talks about rolls of film, and short of only a few other craftsmen in the game, I can't imagine anyone thinking this much this often about film itself. Coogler is your favourite film nerd's favourite film nerd, and part of why he deserves his flowers is because it is not every day we reward Black artists not only for their dedication to pure art, but celebrate them for their depth of enthusiasm about pure tradecraft. I feel like I came out of a film school seminar in eleven minutes.

The Leaves

So that’s all for today.

If you're nominating for the Hugo Awards, remember that noms close on March 28th! I wrote a bunch of poetry that is eligible for the Best Poem Hugo category—including the poem I read to announce the category last year—but also a reminder that I wrote Con-Verse for the Seattle Worldcon Blog, which is eligible for Best Related Work and makes me eligible for Best Fan Writer as well!

A reminder that you can help keep this newsletter and the rest of my work afloat by supporting me on Patreon, buying me a coffee on Ko-fi or sending a donation via PayPal, or by buying one of my small game projects over on Itch!

Until next time, I hope you enjoyed the tea!