OK radio host, political pundits and others so inclined. I realize its MLK Day, but please, you don’t have to prove your down with the cause by mentioning you saw Selma over the weekend. You don’t have to spend minutes explaining how every American ‘must see this important film.’ I understand you want to show sympathy to social injustice in America and around the world, I get that you want to show solidarity to the marches on Ferguson, New York and the inevitable other marches that will occur in years to come when police or citizens feel fearful of an unarmed teenager and shoot him.

To my ears, and I think this happens to a lot of other people, this mantra of supporting a film, claiming the film is a must see because it shows a piece of our recent past, and ‘our’ I mean black people, sounds very patronizing. Last year, the sympathy film was 12 Years A Slave, however The Butler was the palatable back up. A few years earlier, The Help was the movie that would foster racial healing in the cinema.

I look at the promotion of the must see important film for black people on MLK Day kin to hacktivism. It only requires a few dollars and a few hours of your time to see the movie. Supposedly at the end of the viewing your soul will be absolved of any actual or perceived sins against black people. Hacktivist are told that a click will show solidarity to a cause. To link to a hashtag, you favor or share a post on social media and the groundswell of support will change the tide of history. Really? Where is KOFI? Where are the 200 daughters that were captured?

I’ve gotten off point for a bit, but a movie doesn’t make a movement. It doesn’t define a movement nor should it be an example of a movement. Watching a film like Selma will give people a sense of the struggle that happened in getting the Civil Rights Act into law, but many questions aren’t addressed when we make one film the main focus of a movement or idea.

Let me take you into the racial woods for just a moment. At the 82nd Academy Awards nomination, the category of Best Picture was expanded from five films to ten. Other than the 83rd Awards, each year has nominated one film that could be categorized as a black film. The films have been Precious, The Help, Django Unchained, 12 Years A Slave and Selma. Other than Precious, every black film nominated for a best picture Academy Award has been set during slavery or the Civil Rights movement. It seems like for a black film to get nominated for best picture it has to fall under an unwritten formula; fit within the time frame of the Civil War or Civil Rights and you might have a shot at a nomination.

As you can see from the numbers, a lone black film will have to compete against 4-9 non-black films that can be set in any era, any country or any genre. A black film that is nominated faces an impossible task. First of all, since it is the only film with people of color in the cast, the film becomes a symbol to people at large who are eager to show diversity in film. It’s not just a good movie, it is an important film. The film gets elevated to a level it may not deserve. It’s an affirmative action style of nomination. If the film gets in, there is a question as to if the film deserves to be there. If an actor from the film is nominated, the question becomes did they get there because of talent or because a quota needed to be met.

A black film nominated, judging by previous nominations, is impossibly handicapped. Other than Precious, and to some degree Django Unchained, the black films nominated may have a person or character central to the story but the main theme of the movie is the movement of the time. The films nominated, to be cruel about it, are better suited for documentaries than they are for narrative stories. American Sniper, a film nominated this year, is a film about a person. It’s isn’t a defining film about the war, about veterans, about PTSD or other elements you could attach to the film. The movie is about Chris Kyle and the story doesn’t have the baggage as being a definitive film about anything. The same with The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything. They are biographies about people but they aren’t defined as struggle stories about homosexuality or ALS respectively. They are free to tell their stories with being burdened, either in production or imprinted on the film later, as being an example of a social movement.

This brings me to a controversy that has surrounded Selma. Ava DuVernay, the director of Selma, has been accused of making LBJ less historically accurate in the film. It has been said she made him more of an obstructionist than he actually was. Some have claimed, without proof of course, that the negative campaign because of this portrayal may have sabotaged chances of more nominations for the film. This is where things get dicey. On the one hand, as far as conversation in the media the LBJ issue seems to have struck a chord where pundits feel they have to comment on it. I think what may be in play is the observation I made that people think of this as movement movie and not just a movie. If you look at The Imitation Game, there seems to be a slew of questionable depictions in the film, far more than Selma has suffered, yet there haven’t been editorials in national newspapers or discussions on nightly news shows about those. The same can be said of American Sniper and The Theory of Everything.

The biggest issue I have isn’t about the film but the fact that Selma is part of a long line of movement films that are held up in high regard more out of guilt than greatness. Where is the black Silver Lining Playbook? Where is the Hispanic Whiplash? Where is the Asian Nightcrawler? Without a diversity in casting, especially in films set in modern times where diversity would make sense, a lot of minority films that rise to the level of Academy Award contenders are going to be sympathy costume pieces about the struggle of the specific minority group. While they might get nominated for the big prize, I will expect any win will come from a song from the film.