By Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier
(WIB) – On Saturday, at the 57th NAACP Image Awards, “Sinners,” director Ryan Coogler’s epic love letter to the Blues, swept all film categories. Thirteen wins total including Outstanding Motion Picture and Outstanding Breakthrough Performance for Miles Caton.
And Michael B. Jordan, the film’s star, won Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture, which he dedicated to the late Chadwick Boseman — his “Black Panther” costar, who died six years ago at age 43.
“Our time on this planet is short,” Jordan, four years younger than Boseman, said from the stage, voice catching. “I was watching the ‘In Memoriam’ and seeing how fast these careers go by and people’s lives go by, and what we do while we’re here on earth.”
He also talked about being 15, sneaking into the Image Awards through the back door. Feeling seen there, welcomed, and loved in an industry that too often has none for Black folks.
And then the man who has spent most of this awards season watching the industry pass over his work closed with four words that landed like a benediction and a healing balm for us all:
“Man, I love being Black.”
This Was Never Just About Awards
For more than a year we’ve been living through a coordinated assault on Black America, orchestrated by President Donald Trump and the White House. Hundreds of thousands of Black workers laid off or fired. DEI programs gutted. A video of Michelle and Barack Obama as monkeys on Trump’s personal social media account.
Through it all, most of the nation shrugged.
Then came “Sinners,” a Black-made, Blackity-Black-centered film that became a box-office juggernaut. It’s a cinematic gift: our music, our joy, our spirituality, our seemingly-supernatural ability to survive, all wrapped up in a bow with its star, Mr. Michael B. Jordan. (Whenever I type his name I can hear the voice of one of my aunties saying “That man knows he fine… and he can act, too!”)
So of course Black folks claimed the film, and Jordan. Jordan has long been ours. He’s our play cousin, our brother and our uncle and the dude who lives across the street from our grandma. We see him. And of course when Hollywood spent months giving him and the film backhanded compliments, downplaying its success, it felt personal. Because it was.
Catharsis — and Recognition
Let me tell you what it felt like to watch Viola Davis open that envelope for Best Male Performance in a Leading Role Sunday night during the Actor Awards. It was the deep breath before the plunge. Will this be the moment we win, or just another ‘almost’?
And then she read Jordan’s name. Correction: she screamed it.
It was real, pure joy and relief, from the gut. The well-heeled, jewel-bedecked audience of Hollywood stars packed into the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles leapt to its feet with applause.
Jordan turned first to Delroy Lindo — his “Sinners” co-star, the Black man who had stood beside him on the BAFTA Awards stage in London a week earlier while a racial slur rang out across a global broadcast — and pulled him into an embrace. before walking up to claim his trophy.
Watching from home, I screamed right along with Viola. Because it has been that kind of awards season. And lately it’s been that kind of existence for Black America.
Back in January, I wrote about the ritual of awards season — praising Black excellence while handing the trophy elsewhere. Timothée Chalamet won the Critics Choice Award for Best Actor and used his speech to shout out Jordan, calling his “Sinners” performance as twin brothers in the Jim Crow South “unbelievable.” Jordan got the kind words. Chalamet got the hardware.
Then Jordan was snubbed at the Golden Globes. Then the BAFTAs — which, with its ugly racism, became something else entirely. Was he going to be dissed all awards season or what?
This was a cultural exhale, an affirmation in a moment when Black folks are under pressure that, at times, feels unbearable.
This weekend changed everything. On Sunday, Jordan’s Hollywood peers recognized what the NAACP already knew. The Actor Award — historically the most reliable Oscar predictor for Best Actor — now belongs to him.
The trophies matter, sure. But this was a cultural exhale, an affirmation in a moment when Black folks are under pressure that, at times, feels unbearable.
A week ago, the thought of Jordan as Oscar frontrunner was easily dismissed; the momentum wasn’t there. Now it is, but the Oscars are almost two weeks away. Who knows what will happen between now and then. But after a year like we’ve had, with ICE raids and Black history erased from national parks and the N-word shouted at Jordan in a crowded theater on live TV, it feels so good to hope. To believe. To dream.
Michael, if you’re reading, we love being Black, too. And nothing — not snubs, not America doing what America does — can take that away from us.