Today's Oscar nominations contained a host of snubs that have critics and commentators up in arms (as they do every year). But the optics of this year's slate are particularly egregious when you combine the surprising coolness towards the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma—nominated for Best Picture but missing in the Director, Actor, and Screenplay categories—with the fact that all 20 acting nominees this year are white, the first time such a thing has happened since the Oscars honoring the films of 1997.*

The 1998 Academy Awards were dominated by James Cameron's blockbuster Titanic, along with several other box office hits that won critical favor, including As Good as It Gets, Boogie Nights, Good Will Hunting, and the British indie smash The Full Monty. One obvious “Oscar film” featuring people of color, Steven Spielberg's Amistad, was largely snubbed outside of a supporting actor nomination—for Anthony Hopkins. We expect the Academy Awards to ignore all kinds of great genre material; the 2015 list feels all the more galling because David Oyelowo's performance and Ava DuVernay's direction were not just extraordinarily good, but also very Oscar-friendly.

Another sad fact: This year's Oscars see five directors and 14 screenwriters nominated, all men. The last time that happened? The 1999 Oscars. Selma's DuVernay would have been the first African-American woman nominated in the Best Director category—the Oscars have nominated only four women total in their 87 years. Oyelowo was excluded from a crowded Best Actor group (Steve Carell, Bradley Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Keaton, Eddie Redmayne) that features four first-time nominees. You could easily have nominated five different candidates—say, Oyelowo, Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner, Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler, Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Chadwick Boseman in Get On Up—and still boast a powerhouse field.