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Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor is giving himself props for his Best Score nomination for The Social Network, as much as it strains him to do so. “It’s not in my nature to sit back and pat myself on the back, but I’m making myself pause and actually enjoy the moment and say, you know, I really think we did good work on this,” the musician, who is nominated alongside Atticus Ross, tells EW. “And it feels nice to see it be appreciated by an institution that knows what it’s talking about. It feels nice, it really does.”

Yet Reznor hardly expected to be pick up an Oscar nomination at any point during his career. “[It] never crossed my mind,” he says. “I may have had a fantasy of directing somebody. But I don’t think it ever came to the point of thinking anyone would like what I’m doing.”

Obviously, they did — and now the Golden Globe-winning musician, who has spent most of his career as a Hollywood outsider, is suddenly enjoying being on the inside. “At this point in my life, and I guess my maturity level, it doesn’t feel odd,” he says. “What I think is monumental about this is, this isn’t a traditional score. And the movie doesn’t feel like a traditional Oscar candidate film. It’s very contemporary and the score doesn’t behave like normal scores do. This wasn’t like, let’s make something and cater it for awards season. In all honestly, if you’d have told me a year ago [that I’d be nominated], I would never have believed you. We didn’t go into it with that mindset at all.”

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