Uh-oh, I thought, as John Cho and Issa Rae read the nominees for best supporting actress and Jennifer Lopez was not among them. It’s going to be that kind of year. Despite rave reviews and numerous critics awards for her fantastic work in Hustlers, Lopez was just not something enough for Oscar voters. But what is that something? Looking at the overall, largely cautious list of nominees this year, it’s tempting to say she wasn’t white enough. This was a year in which, in terms of diversity, the actors branch in particular missed no opportunity to miss an opportunity. It’s not just Lopez, it’s Eddie Murphy and Lupita Nyong’o and Jamie Foxx and Da’Vine Joy Randolph and the myriad chances the branch had to make this a breakthrough year for Asian actors, all of whom it passed on. And it’s not just the actors branch; it’s the slighting of Dolemite Is My Name’s costume designer, Ruth Carter, and the complete shutout of Lulu Wang’s The Farewell. This list feels like a step backward on a march forward.

But I suspect something else was going on with Lopez and Hustlers, which is that she did everything wrong. She dared to play a character who used her sexuality as a professional survival tool and didn’t regret it; she committed the unforgivable sin of being sympathetic and then not; she took her public image and spectacularly amplified and reworked it to suit a complicated character. That is not what Academy voters want from J. Lo. What they want is for her to scrub off her makeup and play a poor mother dying of something who tries to find someone to take care of her kids. They want a role that says, Look how serious I am. Look how willing I am to punish myself for you. That kind of self-abasement has always been something Academy voters love to see from actresses; even if we set aside the grim social implications of that kind of thinking, what remains is a disappointing limitation of vision. The Academy has never been good at looking at a performance like the one Lopez gives in Hustlers and understanding that it is as serious, committed, and carefully crafted as the kind of stuff it usually likes. Actors, of all people, should know better.

It’s easy, and dangerous, to over-narrativize the Oscar nominations. A list of nominees like the one three years ago, in which 7 out of 20 actors were people of color, makes it tempting to claim victory. And on a day like today, one can easily succumb to the belief that nothing’s working. Setbacks certainly give comfort to reactionary elements that exist quietly within the Academy and more loudly outside of it—people who want any excuse to argue what they’ve been arguing for years and years on many fronts, which is that diversity efforts constitute both special pleading and an exercise in futility. They are, of course, neither. They are going to stumble in some years and be very legible in others, and I hope and believe, perhaps naïvely, that this year will prove an anomaly—partly a reflection of inequities in campaigning and predicting, but partly a reflection of a kind of counterreaction in the movies themselves. Three of the four most-nominated movies—The Irishman, Joker, and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood—are stories about white men who feel culturally imperiled. The fourth, 1917, is about white men who are literally imperiled. It is no accident that those movies have arrived at this particular cultural moment, and while Academy voters don’t necessarily have to eat whatever the industry is feeding them, they usually don’t look too far afield for alternatives, and this year, what the industry was not feeding them was Black Panther or BlacKkKlansman.

This year, with one huge exception—11 nominations for Joker is [coughs politely] certainly a sign of something!—the Academy stuck to the kind of stuff it usually likes. In terms of diversity, what we now know is that, rather than race or gender, internationalizing the Academy membership is the move that is currently having the biggest initial impact. On the heels of last year’s excellent showing (and three Oscars) for Roma, the six nominations for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (Bong himself is, like Quentin Tarantino and, gulp, Todd Phillips, a three-time nominee this year) are an indication that foreign-language movies are being taken more seriously than ever by the membership. So is the fact that, with a very quiet performance in a very crowded field, Pain and Glory’s Antonio Banderas was able to secure a slot over the likes of (the unfairly ignored) Robert De Niro and, to the consternation of dude Twitter, Adam Sandler. The push for the bro-y, explosively profane Uncut Gems was always going to be an uphill struggle, and I wonder if it might have had more of a shot if it had opened earlier, or if the voting season had not been uncharacteristically short. Every year there is a type of movie with a type of male performance—Ryan Gosling in Drive was one, Michael Fassbender in Shame was another—that hits the exact sweet spot of a demographic that is of the world but not of the Academy. Uncut Gems was that movie this year; if anything, it’s a sign of how much times have changed that it wasn’t Joker.