‘Sinners’ Costume Designer Ruth E. Carter Breaks Oscars Records Despite Loss

Ryan Coogler'sSinners previously broke records with 16 nominations at this year's Academy Awards — making the period vampire flick the most-nominated film in the ceremony's 98-year history. However, one nomination at this year's event changed history in a unique way.

Ruth E. Carter, a costume designer and frequent collaborator with Coogler, didn't take home the Best Costume Design at this year's show, her third win in this category, losing to Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein. This award would've made Carter the first-ever Black winner of three Academy Awards.

This is, of course, not Carter's first time breaking records in this category — Carter is also the first African-American to be nominated, and later to win, for Best Costume Design. The designer scored her first costume design nomination for her work on Spike Lee's Malcolm X biopic, released in 1992. She later received a second nomination for Steven Spielberg's historical drama epic Amistad (1997).

It wouldn't be until 2019, however, that she would win her first Oscar, winning for Coogler's groundbreaking Marvel comic book adaptation, Black Panther (2018). She would late win again for its sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022).

Despite the loss, Carter broke records through her nomination alone. With her fifth Oscar nomination for Sinners, Ruth is now the most-nominated Black woman in the ceremony's history.

In addition to her Oscar-nominated works, Carter also served as a costume designer on Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) as well as his remake of Oldboy (2000), the Tina Turner biopic What's Love Got to Do with It (1993), Shaft (2000), Serenity (2005), the historical epic Selma (2014), and Dolemite Is My Name (2019), a comedic biographical film about blaxploitation filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore.