"'Selma' Snubbed" lamented the teaser headline on msnbc.com for Joseph Neese's Academy Awards nomination story. "Director Ava DuVernay doesn't make Oscar cut," complained the subheader. But in fact Selma was not completely "snubbed," garnering two nominations, including the top prize, Best Picture.
But no matter, it was a convenient excuse for the Lean Forward network website to lazily fall back into its old standby: playing the race card:
Despite the presence of “Selma” in the Best Picture race, the remaining films and actors nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) are a vivid reminder of a consistent issue still hanging above film’s most prestigious accolades – an overwhelming lack of diversity. Among the 20 actors and actresses nominated for the most outstanding performances from the last year in film, all were white for the second time in almost two decades. Every performer from “Selma” was overlooked, including British actor David Oyelowo, who pundits predicted would be nominated for his deeply human portrayal of the film’s central character, King.
The Academy Awards’ lack of representation of people of color did not go without a response from the American public. In the aftermath of the nominations, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite began trending on social media. By early Thursday afternoon, there were more than 20,000 mentions of the hashtag on Twitter, which lambasted the Academy’s perceived racial hangup.
Don't worry, ladies and Latinos, Neese made sure to work in your gender and ethnicity, respectively, into his story:
Throughout the Academy’s nearly nine decades, only one female, Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”), has won the Oscar for Best Director. With DuVernay’s omission, the nominees were once again all male and nearly all white, save Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican filmmaker nominated for “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).” Iñárritu’s nomination comes one year after his co-patriot Alfonso Cuarón become the first Latino to win the award for his visual masterpiece “Gravity.”
