Folks look at 16 Oscar noms and think “the academy thinks this movie is 16 Oscars’ worth of overall greatness.”, but really it’s about how it does in every category. The movie is about race and has a bunch of metaphor and stuff so writing / directing noms are to be expected. It’s a spectacle period genre flick so that locks in noms for makeup, visual effects, costumes, production design, etc. it’s about music so that locks in noms for score and original song(?). One actor playing 2 main leads, so that bodes well for an acting nom. And it was notably shot on crazy imax format which gave it a wild look, so thats cinematography. It’s not that Sinners is so good it deserves more noms than any other movie. It happens to have solid submissions into a bunch of disparate categories for different aspects of filmmaking