Another article on Oscar diversity

The narrative of this year’s Academy Awards isn’t be about whether “Spotlight” can edge “The Revenant” or “The Big Short” in the Best Picture race. The story right now is about what wasn’t nominated.

The Academy’s lack of diversity, both in its voting body and in its choices of nominees, is an issue again this year. As much as anyone can argue that such exclusion is simply a product of fierce competition, there were enough worthy films and performances this year that at least something should have been nominated.

Full disclosure: I haven’t seen “Straight Outta Compton.” I missed it in theaters, and it was only just released on home video this week. I can’t honestly say the film deserved a Best Picture nomination. But, guess what? Two of the most influential groups in the industry thought it was deserving, as the Producers Guild nominated it for Best Picture and the Screen Actors Guild nominated it for their top prize (Best Cast). It made a lot of other critics' lists too, and it was a massive success at the box office.

Many Oscar pundits (those are real people) believe “Compton” just missed the cut with the Academy Awards, more a victim of a confusing preferential ballot than overt racism.

Up to 10 movies can be nominated in a given year, but only five are required, and any extras must score a certain number of high ranking votes to make the final cut.

This year, the Academy nominated eight films. Going off all the other award precursors, it was “Compton,” “Carol,” “Inside Out” and probably “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” clawing for the final two spots on the consensus “Top 10.”

Plenty of more knowledgeable and influential people have weighed in on what must be done to make things better.

One is continuing to recruit younger, more diverse members to the Academy.

If “Straight Outta Compton” was so adored by as many industry players as has been suggested, then there seems to be some under-representation in the current voting pool.

The other is dumping the preferential ballot nonsense and going back to 10 Best Picture nominees.

If we had 10, “Compton” may still have missed, but “Stars Wars” or “Inside Out” might have made it, and at least then there would have been a few more movies the general moviegoing public had actually seen.

The issue of diversity gets a little trickier in the individual acting categories, where the entire lineup of this year’s nominees are white.

The Actor categories are often a place of fierce competition, and while Hollywood continues to make very few female-driven movies, at least there are enough roles for women now that we can complain about snubs in the Actress categories.

Where is Charlize Theron’s nomination for “Mad Max: Fury Road?” And how can the Academy just ignore the cultural significance of Daisy Ridley’s “Star Wars” performance?

Anyway, it’s hard to say Michael B. Jordan in “Creed” should have been nominated for Best Actor over, say, Michael Fassbender in “Steve Jobs.” Sure, Jordan’s “Creed” co-star Sylvester Stallone made it into the Supporting Actor race, but he’s probably the best thing about a very good movie.

It’s less about the nominations and more about the overall conversation of “performance” in popular culture.

Yes, Leonardo had a grueling experience shooting “The Revenant,” and yes, he probably should have won an Oscar for any four previous performances.

But his actual performance in “The Revenant” isn’t particularly nuanced. While the film is a challenging and worthwhile piece of cinema, I’m not sure DiCaprio’s performance deserves to be the only thing we talk about when we talk about Best Actor.

As much as I like to joke about my (sometimes blind) admiration of Samuel L. Jackson, it is completely bonkers to see the actor ignored for his performance in Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight.”

The film is understandably divisive, especially in how it uses violence and language to make some provocative statements about systemic racism.

However you feel about it though, there isn’t an actor in all of 2015 that commands the screen quite like Jackson does in “The Hateful Eight.” In most of these articles about Oscar diversity, he isn’t even mentioned as a snub.

Jackson, by the way, was also ignored for Tarantino’s otherwise acclaimed “Django Unchained” in 2012. DiCaprio and Christoph Waltz (who won the Supporting Actor prize that year), dominated the conversation with their showier roles, while Jackson and star Jamie Foxx arguably did the more interesting work in the movie. Spoiler alert for a four-year-old movie, but it isn’t DiCaprio and Waltz sharing the screen in the movie’s final sequence.

And, sorry Eddie Redmayne, but you just won an Oscar last year, and your performance in “Jupiter Ascending” should have earned you a five-year ban from the ceremony.

Switch his nomination this year for “The Danish Girl” out for Jackson, or Jason Mitchell of “Straight Outta Compton” (again, according to those who have seen the movie) or Michael B. Jordan in “Creed.”

Jordan is the one most commonly cited in the #OscarsSoWhite conversation, but even he didn’t get much mention anywhere else on the awards circuit, especially as the “DiCaprio grew a beard” storyline dominated the “physical transformation” corner of the race.

And what about Jordan’s co-star, the equally fantastic Tessa Thompson? She was never considered a contender either, and the Supporting Actress category this year had to be filled in with lead performances (Rooney Mara, “Carol,” and Alicia Vikander, “The Danish Girl”).

Of course we wouldn’t be talking about any of this had the Academy gone and done what almost every other voting body did this year and nominated Idris Elba for “Beasts of No Nation” in the Supporting Actor category.

It was a universally praised performance, and, from my perspective, the easy choice to win in the category. Instead we got the “surprise” nomination of Tom Hardy in “The Revenant,” which isn’t even one of Hardy’s five best personal performances.

Point being, something about the nominations should have been different. Maybe not a lot different, but different enough to at least pretend for an evening that Hollywood isn’t just a place where rich white men decide everything. I’m a white man living in maybe the whitest place in America. Demographically, I’m basically their preferred customer, and even I’m tired of the same old thing.

Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com