The pale grey Oscars are unfair and boring

“WE all dream in gold,” says the official 2016 Oscars poster. The dreaming may be in gold, but the nominations are most definitely in white, while the boycotts are in black. It’s as if that other dream, the one Martin Luther King had, never happened, writes Suzanne Harrington

While black performers are welcome to compere and entertain the audience at the awards ceremony, it is only the white performers who are deemed worthy of the actual gold prize.

But does it matter? After all, it’s just films, right? Made-up escapism to divert us for an hour or two in a comfortable darkened space where we temporarily forget ourselves and become immersed in the pretend lives of others. From grizzly bear attacks to interstellar warfare, it’s all entirely trivial, fictional, unreal.