And the Oscars are out

So, everyone's buzzing about what happened with the Oscars nominations--namely that there was a dearth of black nominees. At this point, why should anyone be surprised? After all, this is the same industry that once listed an overtly racist film in its top 100.

Do Denzel Washington playing a crooked cop in Training Day, Halle Berry sleeping with an old white man in Monster's Ball, the praise over movies like 12 Years a Slave, and "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" winning an Oscar for Best Original Song have anything in common? These movies all have black people in stereotypical or subordinate roles for which there were lots of critical acclaim. That the people behind Selma failed to send screener DVDs to the voters and the uproar over how LBJ was portrayed by the 37th president's apologists as may have been the movie's undoing is really a sign to me that there's still a lot of old boy club mechanisms at work.