Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

About three dozen feature films are nominated for Oscars this yea r, just over 10 percent of the 347 movies that were eligible.  The nominations themselves lead to talk about snubs and inconsistencies, some self-inflicted: how can you have 10 best picture nominees and then only five nominations for best director? How are Mahershala Ali of Green Book , and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz, both of The Favourite,  all in supporting-acting categories when clearly they are leads in their films? (Indeed, I'd argue that in most respects Olivia Colman, nominated for best actress for The Favourite could have been put in supporting instead.) Still, beyond what we say about the nominations themselves, every year I find myself with a list of movies that received no Oscar love at all. (I talked last year about some of the reasons for this .) In a year where the academy's best-picture contenders suggest diversity in Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Green Book  and Roma, it's important...

Close to 20 years ago the ACLU released a report, "Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation's Highways."  It's not new. Neither, for that matter, is getting shot just for being black, too many times by police, on the flimsiest of excuses. But for too many people, there's no connection to those victims because the news audience does not see itself in the people who have been wronged. This is where the movie The Hate U Give, and the thematically similar third episode of the CW drama All American, titled "i," become important. Each takes its time to let us know the characters, to see lives, to understand fears -- before we see the terrible wrongs done to them. Although they are fictional, the characters force us to look at the real world. And it does not do it through allegory -- the way, for instance, Supergirl is a prolonged discourse on immigration -- but by direct presentation of incidents which should dishearten any audience. The...