Just a year ago, 12 Years A Slave won Best Picture at the Oscars, becoming the first film by a black director to win Best Picture. Lupita Nyong’o won Best Supporting Actress for her role in the film. There was talk that the Oscars were finally getting more divorce, but the worst possible thing happened to that trend this morning. The snub of Selma means that this will be the whitest Oscars ceremony since 1998.

The all-white acting class was so glaring that it the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite is trending on Twitter. In fact, as the Huffington Post notes, this is the first time that only white actors have been nominated since 1998. Back in 2007, there were eight non-white actors nominated for awards (and two - Forest Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson - won).

This all happened in a year that the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma was critically acclaimed and even has the best rating on RottenTomatoes among Best Picture nominations. (It is at 99 percent, while Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is at 98 percent.) Selma was only nominated in two categories - Best Picture and Best Original Song for John Legend & Common’s “Glory.”

Instead, the Oscars fell hard for Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, which isn’t sweeping critics off their feet. The film landed six nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Bradley Cooper.

Another issue facing the Oscars is lack of female-lead movies. It just wasn’t that strong a year in that regard, as Jean-Marc Vallee’s Wild was the only one to establish itself as a major player. And it wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. In fact, only one Best Actress nominee - Felicity Jones - starred in a Best Picture nominee, and that was the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything. (All Best Actor nominees starred in Best Picture-nominated films except for Foxcatcher’s Steve Carell.)

Diversity is still a problem within Hollywood, but that’s like saying the sky is blue. It was even an issue at the Golden Globes last weekend. Selma’s David Oyelowo - who was nominated by the Hollywood Foreign Press - lost to The Theory of Everything’s Eddie Redmayne. Sure, we have years like 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2012 and 2014, but these are sadly rarities in the long history of the Academy.

image of Academy president Cheryl Boone-Isaacs courtesy of Jennifer Graylock/INFphoto.com