When it comes to film awards like the Oscars or Golden Globes, there are winners and losers, but there are no snubs. No person or performance should expect or feel entitled to garner a prize, or even a nomination. Nothing’s a sure thing.

We’re reminded every year by those shady anonymous Oscar voters who stir the pot by leaking their ballots to trade magazines that the choices of awards-giving bodies are highly subjective, and not always based purely on merit.

In this year’s Oscar race, two anonymous Academy members who shared their ballots with Variety revealed they didn’t vote for Conclave‘s Ralph Fiennes for Best Actor, under the mistaken belief he already won an Oscar for Schindler’s List (he didn’t). Consequently, both voted instead for The Brutalist‘s Adrien Brody (who did win an Oscar for The Pianist).

Obviously, Academy voters often get things wrong. Like last year, when they left the devastatingly moving drama All of Us Strangers high and dry with zero nominations. This year, several deserving cinematic achievements were egregiously overlooked by the Motion Picture Academy, but not by us, and hopefully not by you. Hence, it’s time we pick the winners the Oscar voters didn’t pick.

Best Original Score

Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, Challengers

The bias against previous winners might also have struck this composing duo, who already have Oscars (and Grammys) for both The Social Network and Soul but were not invited to the party this year for their brilliant score of Luca Guadagnino’s randy tennis rom-com. The hyper-kinetic music by the Nine Inch Nails collaborators encapsulates to electro beats the roiling eroticism, angst, ambition, and athleticism driving the film’s love triangle, giving language to much that remains unspoken. This easily was the most glaring omission among this season’s Academy Award nominees.

Best Director

Luca Guadagnino, Challengers and Queer

Actually, the Academy voters didn’t recognize Challengers with nominations in any category — despite Marco Costa’s dynamic editing that slices assuredly through the film’s nonlinear storyline and on-court contests, despite the masterful cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom capturing the mercurial motion inside the game and between the characters, despite the frank and funny screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, and that propulsive score, and the insanely hot chemistry between stars Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, and the fiercest Zendaya performance we’ve seen yet in a film.

Despite the fact Luca Guadagnino marshaled all that talent to deliver an original film that told a complete story with an exhilarating ending — and then a few months later released the tender, enigmatic gay fever dream Queer — the Academy didn’t call him by his name this year, but we will. Bravo, Luca.

Best Supporting Actress

Tilda Swinton, Problemista

Guadagnino’s frequent collaborator, Swinton this year played muse to three other adventurous filmmakers, starring as a headstrong, terminally ill war reporter in Pedro Almodóvar’s elegiac drama The Room Next Door, as an upper crust wife and mom trying to keep a happy home inside a post-apocalyptic bunker in Joshua Oppenheimer’s offbeat musical The End, and as the art world boss from hell in Julio Torres’ really offbeat satire Problemista.

The Michael Clayton Oscar winner is scary good in all three roles (four, if we’re counting her nuanced work in The Room Next Door), but her raging compulsive Elizabeth in Problemista stands apart, a walking symphony of discontent that the actress makes the most hilariously acidic crank of the year.

Best Supporting Actor

Adam Pearson, A Different Man

Operating on a completely opposite wavelength from Problemista‘s prickly prima donna, Pearson’s gregarious, guileless Oswald in A Different Man epitomizes the power of positive thinking. Oswald doesn’t rage or argue or complain. He’s unfailingly upbeat and confident, and instantly charms everyone he meets. Ignoring his severe facial deformities caused by neurofibromatosis, Oswald is a go-getter and a ladies’ man, and seemingly oblivious to the fact that his peppy, bright demeanor and peppy, perfect life absolutely enrage his envious new friend Guy, wonderfully portrayed by Sebastian Stan.

Oswald might strike the audience as insufferably flawless, too, were it not for the subtle hint in Pearson’s performance that maybe Oswald is aware of how much he gets under Guy’s skin, and he’s loving every minute of making his “friend” squirm. Or, he might just be a truly awesome guy. Thanks to Aaron Schimberg’s perceptive script and direction, and Pearson’s sly performance, we’ll never know for sure.

Best Actress

Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths

In the category of raging and complaining, not even the Problemista herself can touch Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s perpetually displeased Pansy Deacon in the intimate Mike Leigh drama Hard Truths. Pansy’s psychic and emotional wounds are so raw and deep that life itself seems to cause her pain. Any slight disturbance in the air around her — whether caused by her husband and son, or some unfortunate stranger — triggers her fury, unleashed in frothing, caustic, frequently very funny monologues by Jean-Baptiste in a ferociously committed turn that doesn’t shy from the character’s coldness yet ultimately allows Pansy the precious grace of understanding herself a little bit better. On a razor’s edge, Jean-Baptiste balances the woman’s temper and her humanity, so that even as we cower at her rage and snicker at her insults, we still hope for her healing.

Best Actor/Best Picture

Adrien Brody and The Brutalist

In these two final categories, we’ll concede that the Academy members, for the most part, chose their nominees well. Our nods for the year’s Best Actor certainly would include Oscar nominees Colman Domingo (Sing Sing), Ralph Fiennes (Conclave), Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice), and Adrien Brody (The Brutalist), and for Best Picture, we concur on the worthiness of nominees The Substance, Nickel Boys, I’m Still Here, Dune: Part Two, Conclave, and The Brutalist.

If we picked the Oscars, though, Actor and Picture both would go to Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a gorgeously cinematic, complicated tale of art and vision struggling against exploitation and decay. Bursting with all the ugliness and beauty of life, personified in Brody’s captivating performance as troubled architect László Tóth, it’s the most movie of any movie this year, not just by running time, but as an apt reminder that responses to art are extremely subjective, and creative achievement can’t truly be measured by anything as arbitrary as awards.

Read André Hereford‘s movie reviews in Metro Weekly magazine.