The role Delroy Lindo said he deserved an Oscar for: “I was profoundly disappointed”
The 2026 Golden Globes were a big night for Ryan Coogler’s vampire-blues-western-horror, Sinners, which was nominated for seven awards that night, including ‘Best Motion Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and a ‘Best Actor’ prize for Michael B Jordan.
However, one cast member, Delroy Lindo, who plays alcoholic musician Delta Slim, was missing from the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ category, but this isn’t the first time this has happened to him, where, in 2020, the British actor teamed up with frequent collaborator Spike Lee to release Da 5 Bloods, the story of a group of African-American soldiers who return to Vietnam to locate the remains of their fallen comrade, as well as a buried treasure.
It also featured a stacked cast, including Chadwick Boseman in what would be his final screen appearance prior to his untimely death, and appeared in numerous retrospectives of ‘the best films of the year’, but when it came to awards season, it was largely absent, including Delroy’s name, among others.
Lindo spoke about his frustrations surrounding Da 5 Bloods with Entertainment Weekly, remarking bluntly, “I was profoundly disappointed, frankly, before going on to explain that he might not have been hit so hard by the snub had the media not made him think he had a chance.
“Everybody else was talking about it,” he recalled, “There were four of ’em that completely iced both the film and me… I had my own thoughts about what that was about… My point is, if so much of the press were saying, ‘This guy’s going to get nominated’, and it didn’t happen, there’s probably a reason for that.”
As anyone who reads the news during awards season knows, you can usually tell who is going to get nominated for an Academy Award by about mid-January. The press have become very good at predicting who is going to be up for the big prizes, through a mixture of strong journalism, industry rumour, and probably a few other unscrupulous means too. In the case of Da 5 Bloods, however, they were way off, and by the time the Oscars rolled around, the only category the film made a dent in was ‘Best Original Score’. That’s nothing to sniff at, sure, but it left more than a few people disappointed.
Spike Lee and his movies have a long and often depressing history with the Oscars, where, in spite of making some of the greatest and most important films of all time, he didn’t receive his first and only ‘Best Director’ nod until 2018.
Given that Lee’s movies often deal with the Black diaspora in America and that the Academy have had a, shall we say, ‘spotty’ record when it comes to recognising people of colour, statistics like that become a little uncomfortable, so when Da 5 Bloods became the latest in a long line of snubs, the director responded in his usual fashion.
With the 2026 Oscars just on the horizon, it’s looking unlikely that Lindo will be recognised this time around either. While his body of work more than speaks for itself, it would be nice if he got the flowers he deserved at least once in his career.
