2021’s “Dune” got 10 Oscar nominations, including best picture (and won in six categories), but the massive accomplishment of this sci-fi adaptation somehow didn’t lead to a best director nomination for Denis Villeneuve. 2024’s “Dune: Part Two” was even more impressive, but it only got half as many nominations as its predecessor (it won two Oscars), and once again Villeneuve was snubbed for best director.

You could maybe justify both of Villenueve’s snubs on their own — the first “Dune” could be deemed too incomplete as a narrative, while the second part came out early enough in the year that voters might have forgotten about it amidst a flood of fall and winter releases. But for the director’s branch to snub Villeneuve for the “Dune” series twice starts to feel like a weird pattern. Either they’re waiting to honor his achievements for 2026’s “Dune: Part Three” — a gamble, given how weird the “Dune: Messiah” novel gets and how trilogies sometimes end on low points — or they’re just not as into “Dune” as the rest of the world is.

More than the rest of the Academy, the directors’ branch has a tendency to ignore blockbusters. Remember, they didn’t nominate any of Christopher Nolan’s movies until “Dunkirk” and snubbed Greta Gerwig for “Barbie.” While their higher-brow taste does make for some worthwhile surprise nominees, surely Villeneuve’s work on the “Dune” series would have been more exciting picks than, say, Kenneth Branagh for “Belfast” or James Mangold for “A Complete Unknown.”

Since 2018, when he starred in “Mandy” and voiced Spider-Man Noir in “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” Nicolas Cage has been making a comeback. He might not sell tickets the way he did in the ’90s, but he’s out of his “starring in the worst movies imaginable to pay off the IRS” phase from the early 2010s. Cage’s recent films aren’t always great, but he’s at least picking interesting projects that remind us that he can actually act.

2021’s “Pig,” directed by Michael Sarnoski, is the artistic high point in this phase of Cage’s career, and should have earned him his third Oscar nomination if not his second win. In the film, Cage plays Rob Feld, a reclusive truffle forager seeking to avenge his stolen pig. It sounds like “John Wick”-style genre fare from the logline, but “Pig” uses its strange concept and Cage’s reputation to subvert expectations.

Viewers know Cage for his over-the-top outbursts of rage, and Rob’s got a boiling anger within him that makes him feel dangerous, and yet he rarely lets that anger boil over, instead delivering a subtle tearjerker about love and grief. Cage won awards from many critics’ organizations for his excellent performance, but “Pig” didn’t get a single Oscar nomination.

For being more philosophically insightful, satirically pointed, and emotionally moving than any movie made to sell toys has any right to be, “Barbie” earned eight Oscar nominations — but the big story was who didn’t get nominated. Snubbing Greta Gerwig in best director and Margot Robbie in best actress provoked massive mainstream outrage from fans who blamed sexism and a bias against comedies for these omissions.

But which of these two snubs was worse? In the director race, I might personally prefer Gerwig’s work to some of the nominated directors, but I can’t really say any of the nominees for 2023 were undeserving of their nominations, and Justine Triet’s nomination for “Anatomy of a Fall” somewhat softens the argument that Gerwig was snubbed for sexist reasons. For best actress, however, it’s much easier to say where Robbie should have fit into the list of nominees: She should have replaced one of the two Netflix biopic performances (Annette Bening in “Nyad” or Carey Mulligan in “Maestro”).

The Oscars’ acting branch has long shown favoritism towards actors imitating real people, regardless of whether those performances end up being particularly memorable in the long term. In “Barbie,” Robbie embodies the world’s most famous doll and gradually transforms this comic caricature into a “real” woman. We’re gonna remember that a lot longer than the biopics that got nominated in her place… if anyone still even remembers them.

The Academy’s actors branch must have reacted to Todd Haynes’ dark comedy “May December” — about an actress (Natalie Portman) going method to play a sexual predator (Julianne Moore) — like Maddy (Alexa Demie) in “Euphoria” going “Wait, is this ****ing play about us?” That’s the only excuse that makes sense for why all three of its stars got snubbed, despite giving some of the most daring and captivating performances of 2023.

It’s especially egregious that Charles Melton’s performance as Joe Yoo, the husband and grooming victim of his former middle school teacher, was snubbed. Melton’s sensitivity is essential to the movie working at all. The film’s jokes are able to land because Joe’s trauma is never played as a joke, instead treated as the heartbreaking tragedy it is — even as Joe denies the severity of his situation.

The 2023 supporting actor race had some tough competition. Robert Downey Jr. was all but guaranteed to win for playing Lewis Strauss in “Oppenheimer,” and Ryan Gosling was a worthy runner-up as Ken in “Barbie.” But even against a number of other great supporting performances, Melton’s — which won the Gotham Award and the New York Film Critics Circle, among other honors — stands out, and the snub of him and his co-stars reflected poorly on the Academy.

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• The Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.

• The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN’s National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

Both of the first two “Knives Out” films received Oscar nominations for their screenplays and absolutely nothing else. Unless this year’s introduction of a best casting award affords a new opportunity for “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” it seems safe to assume the series is going to stick to this pattern of writing-only Oscar recognition in the future. If Rian Johnson’s mystery movies were going to be rewarded by the broader Academy, the actors branch certainly would have done so for Janelle Monáe’s performance as twins Andi and Helen Brand in 2022’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”

Monáe’s delightfully entertaining work playing a character secretly pretending to be another character was key to the film’s big twists — and its righteous anger — landing as well as they did. She won the National Board of Review’s best supporting actress award and got a Critics’ Choice nomination, but Oscar didn’t bite. She would have been a more worthy Oscar winner that year than Jamie Lee Curtis, who didn’t even give the most interesting supporting actress performance in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (Stephanie Hsu was better) and won almost purely as a legacy career honor.

Of 2022’s three big dark comedies about wealthy people on an isolated island — “The Menu,” “Triangle of Sadness,” and “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” — it was “Triangle of Sadness” that got the most Academy Award nominations despite being the worst reviewed of the three. “The Menu” ended up completely shut out of Oscar nominations, though its original screenplay did manage to get a nomination from the Writers Guild of America (where Oscar nominees “Triangle of Sadness” and “The Banshees of Inisherin” were ineligible, providing an opening for “The Menu” and Jordan Peele’s “Nope”).

Speaking as a critic who found “The Menu” funnier, more creative, and much better paced than the thematically similar “Triangle of Sadness,” I find the WGA original screenplay list preferable to the Oscars that year. “Nope” and “The Banshees of Inisherin” are more of an apples-and-oranges comparison than “The Menu” and “Triangle of Sadness”, but “Nope” is yet another smart horror movie the Oscars completely ignored and probably shouldn’t have.

At least one of the writers of “The Menu,” Will Tracy, could be getting his first Oscar nomination soon for the adapted screenplay of “Bugonia.” Seth Reiss, the other writer of “The Menu,” will have to wait longer, as his big original screenplay for “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” failed to capture the hearts of critics and audiences this year.

2022 and 2023 were exceptional years for animated films — and yet, the Academy failed to nominate a single one of that great crop of cartoons outside of the designated best animated feature category. “Turning Red,” “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,” “The Boy and the Heron,” “Nimona,” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” were all movies worthy of greater Oscar love, but the biggest snub of these years was perhaps Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pinocchio.”

The Academy loves Del Toro enough that even a box office bomb like “Nightmare Alley” could sneak into best picture. If hoping his take on “Pinocchio” could do the same was unrealistic, at least there seemed to be a chance it could get recognized for its screenplay by Del Toro and “Over the Garden Wall” creator Patrick McHale. After all, it was the first-ever animated nominee at the USC Scripter Awards and was recognized by many critics’ groups. Recapturing the darkness of Carlo Collodi’s original fairy tale while recontextualizing its moralism into a subversive anti-fascist parable is surely a more impressive writing accomplishment than “Top Gun: Maverick,” right? No offense to “Top Gun” fans, but if we’re talking about films where writing and adaptation are most important for the quality…

Academy voters liked or at least respected “Nickel Boys” enough to nominate it for best picture, but somehow, that and best adapted screenplay were the only two nominations for RaMell Ross’ artful adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel “The Nickel Boys.” “Nickel Boys” might have been the best movie of 2024 and deserved way more nominations, but the snub that stings the most is for Jomo Fray’s groundbreaking cinematography.

Fray shot almost the entire movie from the alternating first-person perspectives of two characters, and the third-person sequences in the present day might as well be first-person from one of those characters’ ghosts. The cinematography puts the qualities of the medium that Roger Ebert described as an “empathy machine” into hyperdrive, enveloping the viewer in memory and forcing them to confront a dark chapter in America’s history of racism head-on.

Maybe this experimental approach was too overwhelming for conservative tastes within the Academy, but remember: They liked the movie, and I don’t know how you snub the cinematography if you like the movie. There is no movie here without Fray’s cinematography working perfectly! The Indie Spirits and the three biggest film critics groups (New York, Los Angeles, and the National Society of Film Critics) got it right; the Oscars got it wrong. The cinematography branch just had to give “Emilia Pérez” an extra nomination…

So this snub isn’t actually the fault of the voters. Since 2008, the rules for best original song allow nominations for only two songs per movie, so musicals have to be strategic about which songs get Oscar campaigns. In 2021, composer Lin-Manuel Miranda chose to submit only one song from “Encanto,” the emotional Spanish-language ballad “Dos Oruguitas.” It’s a beautiful song that got a well-deserved nomination, but lost to Billie Eilish’s title song for “No Time to Die.”

One wonders if “Encanto” could have taken the gold had they decided to also submit the infectiously catchy “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” the closest thing a Disney musical has had to a classic “villain song” in some time. Keep in mind that Oscar submission deadlines were before the film hit theaters that Thanksgiving, and well before the Christmas Disney+ release that propelled “Bruno” into an inescapable Billboard-topping phenomenon. The song was such a big deal that, despite its lack of a nomination, the Oscars just had to shoehorn a live performance of it at the ceremony.

Best international feature is another Oscar category with strange rules. Only one film per country is submitted, which in theory evens the playing field so a single country can’t dominate, but in practice means governmental bodies deciding which film to submit hold a lot of weight. This means politics plays a big role in decisions. Iranian dissident filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi have to depend on co-producers in Germany and France to submit their movies since Iran obviously won’t. It’s even rumored that France didn’t submit “Anatomy of a Fall” as punishment for Justine Triet’s political speech at Cannes (the film got nominated for four Oscars and won best original screenplay, making the international snub less upsetting).

There may have been political elements to India snubbing the blockbuster hit “RRR” in favor of “Last Film Show” as its 2022 international feature submission, but more likely, they just went with the movie that felt more like awards bait. On paper, a “Cinema Paradiso”-inspired love letter to cinema sounds more Oscar-friendly than a culturally specific Tollywood action-musical. Yet international audiences loved “RRR,” and judging by the best original song win for the showstopping “Naatu Naatu,” so did Oscar voters. India has only been nominated for best international feature three times, and by snubbing “RRR,” they lost out on one of their better chances at not only getting nominated but winning.

Look, there is probably no universe in which “I Saw the TV Glow,” Jane Schoenbrun’s indie teen horror movie, was going to be a major Oscar contender. Even if the Academy occasionally goes for horror like “The Substance,” the genre still stacks the odds against it. Then consider that its performances are deadpan rather than showy, its themes are presented through abstract metaphor rather than spelled out for easy understanding, and that A24 had more traditional Oscar bait like “The Brutalist” to campaign in the 2024-25 awards season.

But it’s still embarrassing that “I Saw the TV Glow” got zero Oscar nominations in the same year “Emilia Pérez” got 13. The former is a masterpiece from a trans director, viscerally expressing the pain of gender dysphoria and the confusion of trying to figure out an identity you haven’t been taught the words for. The latter may have had good intentions, but ended up offending not only many trans viewers but seemingly the entire country of Mexico — and its history-making trans best actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón offended everyone else with her tweets.

At the very least, one could have hoped one of the great original songs in “I Saw the TV Glow” (none of which contain the lyrics “From penis to vaginaaaaaaaaa”) could get an Oscar nomination, but they didn’t even make the shortlists! Ah, well, cult classics don’t need awards to justify their genius.