Why One Performance Was Seen—and Another Wasn’t

Two films, two transgressions, one hierarchy

With awards season upon us, I’ve been thinking about two performances from last year that, on the surface, seem to be doing similar work—and about what it means that one was rewarded and the other ignored.

Before going any further, a few things worth naming plainly.

• I’ve watched Sinners and One Batter After Another multiple times.

• I don’t watch awards shows, and I don’t treat them as arbiters of taste or quality.

• I respect that others do.

• I enjoy cinema deeply—especially cinema that challenges, unsettles, and complicates easy moral narratives.

• Both of these films do exactly that.

What interests me is not whether awards “got it right,” but what their decisions reveal—sometimes unintentionally—about how recognition works, and how power continues to organize and focus visibility.

The performances I’m thinking about are Teyana Taylor in One Battle After Another and Hailee Steinfeld in Sinners. Both are playing transgressive feminine figures—women who violate social rules, unsettle racial and political boundaries, and refuse easy containment.

But only one of those performances is being institutionally “seen.”

Taylor plays a Black revolutionary who marries one white man (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), is impregnated by another (played by Sean Penn), and then largely disappears from the film. Her presence is electric—sexual, dangerous, politically charged. But it is also fleeting. Her character functions less as a fully realized subject than as a catalytic force through which white male turmoil, guilt, desire, and ideological crisis are processed.

It’s an excellent performance–worthy of the recognition the Golden Globes bestowed upon her. But it’s also a familiar configuration. A Black woman is permitted to be radical, erotic, and destabilizing so long as that energy is narratively contained within a white-directed prestige project anchored by important white men. Her transgression animates the story without reorganizing it.

That configuration has a long lineage. It echoes Monster’s Ball, where Halle Berry delivered a raw, devastating performance—and won an Oscar for it. The performance was undeniable. But it was also framed through white male suffering and redemption. The award didn’t challenge that framing; it depended on it.

Now consider Steinfeld in Sinners.

She plays a married white woman in love with a Black man (Michael B. Jordan) in the Jim Crow South. She’s not furtive. Not tragic. She isn’t meant to serve as a moral lesson. She is confident, arresting, unapologetic. She violates rules and customs without asking the audience to absolve her or pity her.

And crucially, all of this happens inside a film authored by Black filmmakers.

That context matters.

In Sinners, whiteness is not the organizing consciousness. Steinfeld’s character is not a symbolic device for white male reckoning. Her desire is not purified through punishment or shame. She is fully present—choosing, risking, acting—inside a moral universe that does not revolve around her.

That is a far more destabilizing transgression than the one Taylor is allowed to perform in One Battle After Another.

And it is one the awards ecosystem does not know how to reward.

So Steinfeld is not nominated at all.

This is where institutional logic becomes visible. By awarding a Black woman for a transgressive role inside a white-directed, white-starred prestige film, awards bodies blunt critique. The move appears progressive. It inoculates against accusations of bias. And yet, at the same time, it quietly reinforces an older hierarchy: this is the kind of transgression we recognize; this is the kind we can safely honor.

Meanwhile, a performance that exists inside a Black-authored world—where whiteness is not centered, excused, or elevated—remains unacknowledged.

The message is not that one actress was better than the other. It’s that one framework matters more. One kind of story remains legible. One kind of risk can be absorbed without consequence.

This isn’t hypocrisy so much as its orthodoxy. Awards don’t just reward excellence. They reward containment. And the most unsettling thing about Sinners isn’t interracial love. It’s that no one asks permission for it.

Note: I totally recognize that I am starting the year with two very different kinds of pieces. First, a political essay. Now, a work of film criticism. That shift is intentional though not meant to signal a departure of from the leadership and organizational identity ideas I’ve been wrestling. This space is meant for broad and omnivorous engagement—with politics, culture, history, and art—because they are deeply entangled. That said, there is always an organizing principle underneath: my commitment to challenging power, interrogating assumptions (often my my own), and unsettling institutions in service of a more honest and just world.

-DDR