The 2026 Oscar nominations’ biggest surprise is thrilling everyone—even Sinners skeptics.
When the 2026 Oscar nominations were announced on Thursday morning, one surprise was a delight above all others: Delroy Lindo earned a nomination for his role as Delta Slim in Sinners—Ryan Coogler’s Black vampire horror film that has since become the most Oscar-nominated film of all time. Lindo was not expected to earn a nomination; the awards prediction site GoldDerby had him at only a 6.57 percent chance of earning one, compared to Hamnet’s Paul Mescal, who had a 93.64 percent chance but didn’t make it into the category. But the nod wasn’t just a thrill for being unanticipated—it was a joy because this much-deserved recognition is shockingly the first Oscar nomination for the 73-year-old legend of Black cinema.
In a movie packed with standout performances from both Hollywood veterans and fresh faces, Lindo’s performance in Sinners is certainly one of the most deft. But there’s more than one reason it’s a rare kind of performance for the academy to honor: Delta Slim—a talented blues musician and alcoholic whom the leading Smokestack twins hire to play at the grand opening of their juke joint—often operates as the comedic relief. However, the humor in Lindo’s performance isn’t the hokey kind, but rather the kind of comedy you hone your skills at when you’ve spent a good amount of time trying to keep yourself from crying. Slim is a layered character who laughs and creates art as a byproduct of living a life of pain and persecution. Few actors can pull it off as well as Lindo (and in such little screentime to boot), best evidenced by his monologue wherein Slim tells the story of how one of his friends was framed by the Ku Klux Klan for murder and sexual assault and lynched. The scene—which might have been cut if it weren’t for Lindo’s advocating for it—heartbreakingly shows Slim, in real time, channeling his overwhelming emotions into music. Knowing that the musical element of the scene was improvised by Lindo just underscores how grounded his performance is.
Still, as extraordinary as Lindo is in Sinners, it’s far from the first movie in which he’s given us an awards-worthy performance. The actor has been doing that for more than three decades, particularly in his collaborations with Spike Lee. There was his small but intimidating role as the gangster “West Indian” Archie in Lee’s 1992 masterpiece Malcolm X, cowing even Denzel Washington’s title character; as Woody, the struggling musician and patriarch in Lee’s 1994 exploration of Black girlhood, Crooklyn; and as the local drug lord Rodney Little in Lee’s 1995 adaptation of Clockers. But, before Coogler’s genre flick, Lindo’s crown jewel was his staggering turn in Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. The film, which follows a group of four Black vets who return to Vietnam in order to procure the remains of their squad leader (the fifth of the titular self-dubbed “Bloods”), was well-loved by critics, if polarizing among general audiences. But the one thing everyone seemed to agree upon was Lindo’s excellence in it as Paul, who suffers the most from the PTSD that racks the Bloods’ minds. As Slate’s Sam Adams wrote at the time, “Lindo’s performance is titanic, so full of emotions that you can practically see them fighting for space on his face.”
After years of delivering consistently great performances in roles big and small, Da 5 Bloods seemed like Lindo’s opportunity for widescale industry recognition in the form of a little golden man, especially after he won the prizes for best actor from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. Sensing an opening, that awards cycle was the first time Lindo had done that kind of campaigning for a film, but on the morning of the Oscar nominations, it proved to be all for naught, as he was the subject of one of the year’s most notorious snubs. As Lindo told the Hollywood Reporter, he thought his team was “joking” when they delivered the news. According to Lindo, he and Lee “commiserated for a minute,” during which Lee told him: “It hurts, but you’ve got to keep working.”
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But what made that snub sting all the more was that it sat atop a mountain of great work already. It wasn’t just Lindo’s films with Lee, but the numerous times he captivated and devastated us on our screens. Outside of his many roles in Black cult classics that were essential to my upbringing—who can forget him grooving down a Soul Train dance line with Loretta Devine at the end of the feel-good holiday film This Christmas, or his role as the menacing Isaak O’Day in Romeo Must Die—his talents were displayed in all manner of stories. He banters about screenwriting with John Travolta in Get Shorty and has a great stint as Adrian Boseman on the hit CBS series The Good Fight from the late 2010s, among many others. Personally, I’m partial to his role that is so great but so small that he’s uncredited, in the 1995 film Congo, wherein he tells Tim Curry to “Stop eating my sesame cake!”
The Oscars are quite fond of the legacy award, it’s true. Better late than never. But rarely has it felt more deserved than this. Paul Mescal will have his turn—and indeed, the 29-year-old was already nominated three years ago for Aftersun—but it’s Lindo’s time to shine now. It has been since before I was born.
