Blade Runner 2049's director thinks he knows why it didn't score a Best Picture nomination

“It’s very uncommon for a movie that didn’t do well at the box office in the United States to get a nomination for best picture,” affirming what basically every study of Best Picture Oscar nominations reaffirms: Make us some money, or else. Given that Blade Runner 2049 is running a projected loss of around $80 million for Warner Bros., that makes sense. Also, it means all those highfaluting artistic types—the people actually responsible for submitting nominations—are way more swayed by financial considerations when they’re considering what art to give a prize to than they’d presumably care to admit.

Villeneuve wasn’t complaining about the snub, to be clear. He was understandably proud of the film’s five nominations for technical achievements and cinematography (which, holy hell, Roger Deakins deserves a Oscar at the very least for his work), but expressed regret that Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch didn’t receive a nomination for the soundtrack. “I think what [the composers] did for the movie, the score of the movie, was by far one of the best this year,” Villeneuve said. That being said, Zimmer is already nominated for his work on Dunkirk, so he’s probably just as happy to not compete against himself.