"At The Oscar Nominations, It's A Good Year To Be An Idiosyncratic Man."

The headline, at NPR, for analysis by Linda Holmes. You have to scroll down to get to the part I was googling to find:

Even for the Oscars — even for the Oscars — this is a really, really lot of white people. Every nominated actor in Lead and Supporting categories — 20 actors in all — is white.

The actor nominees are all white people! You'd think that — at least for show — they'd have felt compelled to nominate the man who went to all that trouble to impersonate Martin Luther King Jr. (in "Selma"). That took effort. You have to really want a whites-only slate to exclude him. (His name, which everyone is now free — at last! — to forget, is David Oyelowo.)

But I'd also noticed how very male-centered the nominated movies are. Holmes says:

• Every nominated director is male. Every nominated screenwriter is male.

• ... Every Best Picture nominee here is predominantly about a man or a couple of men, and seven of the eight are about white men, several of whom have similar sort of "complicated genius" profiles, whether they're real or fictional....

So... "It's A Good Year To Be An Idiosyncratic Man"... but shouldn't it be "It's An Especially Good Year To Be An Idiosyncratic Man"? Movies about an idiosyncratic man are the norm and have been for a long time. Think of all the trailers that begin "In a world where... one man..." Here are "The 10 best 'In a world...' movie trailers."

You'd think Martin Luther King Jr. would fit right in as that one man in a world.

But no. From Oscar's point of view, 2014 was An Especially Good Year To Be An Idiosyncratic White Man.

ADDED: Oscar's answer is: Hey, we did "12 Years a Slave" last year! Wasn't that enough for you?! That is, basically the same argument as: Hey, we elected a black President! Can we stop talking about race now? The answer, even for Hollywood, is: no.

"I have come to view hotness as the enemy of everything about pop culture that I enjoy."

Linda Holms hates hotness.

Because hotness is a vapid, ill-considered cheat so you don't have to discuss, think about, or take a position regarding the quality of anything. "You know what's hot? Twilight!" "Okay, but...is it good?" "Not the point! Not the point! Read these 1000 words on why it's hot!"

Consider the Rolling Stone ["hot"] list. Barack Obama is hot; so is Leighton Meester from Gossip Girl. The sport of winching is hot; so is genuinely brilliant musician Bon Iver.

The closest I can come to explaining what "hot" is supposed to mean in this context is something like: "Things you have already heard of, or things that everyone else has heard of except for you, and if anyone finds out you haven't heard of them, they'll make fun of you, so listen carefully."...

If you wander through the recent news listings looking for the word "Hottest," you will see exactly what I mean. As of this writing, the results include Lonely Planet's possible endangering of the Bay Of Fires by naming it the "Hottest Travel Destination" of the year; a discussion of the continuing hotness of the Wii; and plenty of coverage of the aforementioned Suri Cruise being named the Forbes "Hottest Tot."

That's right: Hottest Baby.

Hottest Baby? Is hottest baby thirsty? I've got just the thing.

I think Holmes should simmer down. There's a benefit to labeling things hot. It tells you to move on to something else, something newer and hipper or -- if you hate hipness even more than hotness -- to whatever it is you actually like as a matter of personal taste -- if you still have any. If you don't. Get some. It's hot.