Sharpton: Selma Snub Ironic in the ‘Age of Ferguson’

Thursday on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation,” host Al Sharpton claimed even though Selma was nominated for Best Picture, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ lack of diversity, citing the member voters are 93 percent white and 76 percent male, as the reason Selma’s actors and director where not nominated this year.

Sharpton said, “30 years from now America will be talking about the age of Obama, about the age of Ferguson and Staten Island, and these will be the nominees in Hollywood. Imagine people looking at this saying, ‘what this couldn’t be at that time,’ and the only one making it for Best Picture was ‘Selma’ who did the story of blacks not being allowed to vote. Oh, so we’re going to duplicate it in Hollywood, because they’re not voting in the academy, and you can’t have a director, a female black director at all even nominated? There’s something about this that begs for us to deal with this.”

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