If The Substance has a lock on just one of the five awards it’s nominated for at this Sunday’s Oscars… Well, okay, it’s probably going to be for Demi Moore. (Hollywood loves a comeback!) But Coralie Fargeat’s film is in arguably just as good a position to score the win for Best Makeup And Hairstyling, given how The Substance derives undeniable power from its presentation of female bodies and faces (and the ways they can be deformed).

Now, though, there’s an unexpected controversy brewing underneath the potential win: One of the film’s credited key hair artists, Frédérique Arguello, is claiming that she’s been passed over for Academy Award consideration in favor of her assistant, Marilyne Scarselli. The ensuing argument (per Deadline) not only produces some pretty heated critiques between key members of the film’s staff: It also highlights how the Academy’s tightly controlled rules for who and how many people can win awards for collaborative efforts can directly engineer these kinds of conflict.

It’s like this: Arguello claims she’s been excluded from Oscars consideration, despite being both the designer and hairstylist for the film for five months, before departing the movie three weeks before it finished filming due to “family and health reasons.” “I worked on the creation of the hairstyles and, because it was a small crew, there was only myself as a key hair person and my assistant Marilyne,” Arguello said in an interview. By the time she left the movie, “There was only continuity that had to be done … And [Scarselli], at that time, took my place on the call sheet as the key hair, only for 15 days, three weeks. I’ve got all the proofs that I was not only the hair designer, but I’m the one who was the key hair for five months.” Nevertheless, it’s Scarselli’s name now on the nomination list.

Scarselli, however, has pushed back on this version of events, saying that Arguello had actually been moved away from working with Moore even before she formally departed the film. “After one month of shooting,” Scarselli told Deadline, “[Arguello] made a mistake on the wig for Demi Moore. After this accident with the wig, Demi Moore doesn’t want to work with her anymore. I am on the set, so I do the hair for Demi Moore [for the rest of the production].” Scarselli’s case, essentially, is that, while she wasn’t designing the looks used for Moore in the film, she was the one doing the actual hairstyling: “It’s really uncomfortable,” Scarselli said of the conflict with Arguello, “And I’m really so sorry for her, but I think I am at my place too at the Oscars, because I was doing the job too. I’m not the designer, I’m not in the prep, but I’m here doing the job on the hair on Demi.”

This back-and-forth—Arguello has also made a public Instagram post in which she claimed “Marilyne Scarselli continues to publicly claim a role that neither reflects her actual involvement nor her level of responsibility, thus depriving me of a prestigious distinction to which I am rightfully entitled”—has landed the film’s distributor, MUBI, in the middle of a nasty, and now public, fight. While acknowledging that Fargeat did send a letter to the Academy (contents irritatingly unknown) about the decision to put forward Scarselli’s name over Arguello’s, the company also made it clear that the nomination is ultimately a call made by the Academy, and specifically its Makeup and Hair Branch Executive Committee, which reviews all such submissions.

And, look: We know Makeup and Hairstyling is very few people’s most exciting Oscar category. But you can’t watch The Substance without being hit, over and over again, with how impactful these professionals’ decisions can be—and if we’re claiming that the Oscars hold genuine merit in acknowledging the hard creative work of making films, then it behooves them to dole that recognition out equitably. It’s worth noting that both the BAFTAs, and the Critics Choice Awards, got around this whole controversy in a very simple way: They nominated both Scarselli and Arguello (along with two others), both of whom are now BAFTA-winners thanks to their work on the film. But the Oscars only allow three people, max, to be nominated for a film for this award. In the case of The Substance, those three are Scarselli (credited as Assistant Hair Artist/Key Artist), Pierre-Olivier Persin (special makeup effects designer/special makeup effects supervisor), and Stéphanie Guillon (key makeup artist). And so, here we are: An odd, unpleasant fight breaking out during what should be a career highlight for multiple people, all because the Academy arbitrarily gates how much recognition there is to go around.