From a 2.18 Anne Thompson/Indiewire piece, “Why Iñárritu’s The Revenant Will Likely Win Best Picture”: “Why, if The Revenant, is such an arduous, demanding, rigorous and large-scale period piece, did it not win the PGA award that went to The Big Short?

“One answer may be that the producers saw a movie that wasn’t, in the conventional sense of the word, well-produced. Coming in over-budget at $135 million, The Revenant broke the rules, forcing all its departments to service, in effect, the needs and demands of the cinematographer in the last hour and a half of natural magic-hour light every day, to make any shot possible in a 360-degree world, to chase locations, mostly without backup from any cover sets.

No producer ever wants to make a movie under those conditions. And it’s unlikely that Iñárritu himself would repeat the experience. He had never made a big-budget studio film before.

“At the all-white-male Hollywood Reporter directors’ round-table — among whom Iñárritu was the only eventual Oscar nominee — the other directors looked both aghast and impressed at what he had endured.”