David Oyelowo got hosed.

'Selma' cast 'bummed' by Oscar snub

"I’m not quite sure how you get a Best Picture nomination without a great director at the helm."

Oh, really?

Well, I am sure, so I'll tell you. It's called arithmetic. Eight films are nominated for best picture, but the best director category is limited to five.

Therefore, at least three directors of the best picture nominees will not be nominated as best director.

This year there were four directors in that category, the ones who helmed American Sniper, Selma, The Theory of Everything, and Whiplash. There was one extra because Bennett Miller was nominated for Foxcatcher, even though his film was not among the best picture nominees. The Bennett Miller thing is difficult to explain, since his film didn't even make the top eight, but the exclusion of several directors, at least three when there are eight best picture nominees, is mathematically inevitable.

I don't really have any thoughts about whether Ava DuVernay should have been nominated in the best director category. Maybe so. She did a great job, but if it were up to me, I probably would have given Bennett Miller's controversial nomination to Christopher Nolan for Interstellar, although nobody but me has even brought Nolan into the conversation, so I can't really be DuVernay's advocate. I do want to weigh in on another matter. Steve Carell was nominated in the best actor category for his performance as John du Pont. David Oyelowo was not nominated for his performance as MLK. Now let me establish that I don't care about this diversity thing. If the best twenty performances are all delivered by fake Nigerian royalty or Bulgarian sausage-stuffers or lily-white members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, so be it. But in this case we have directly comparable performances of actors performing as real people, and we have plenty of footage of the real people they are portraying, and it's obvious that the wrong guy was nominated.

If Steve Carell just came out and performed in character and nobody told you who he was supposed to be, you would have absolutely no idea that he was supposed to be du Pont, except maybe for the silly putty nose. Make the comparison yourself, if you don't believe me. Sure, Carell looked and sounded nothing like himself, so props for that level of acting, but he also sounded and acted nothing like John du Pont. He just sounded and acted like an awkward man who spoke slowly and seemed both dumb as an ox and obviously demented. On the other hand, Du Pont had a PhD, and while he was awkward, he spoke like a man reasonably well accustomed to schmoozing and speaking in public. He also talked at a normal human speed, perhaps faster when he did a lot of cocaine, as he often did. Wrestler Mark Schultz, the author of the book upon which Foxcatcher is based, said that "his words spouted out of his mouth like an excitable parrot."

It's not a diversity thing at all. Oyelowo deserved to get that nomination on merit.

To be fair, Mark Schultz does not really agree with me. He felt Carell's portrayal of du Pont was good, but I stand by my points. Look at the film clips of real/du Pont and Carell/du Pont and make up your own mind. By the way, Schultz also said that Mark Ruffalo was absolutely perfect in his representation of Mark's brother, murder victim Dave Schultz. In that case, based on what I have seen and read, I agree completely.