“Selma” came out in limited release on Christmas Day, 2014, making it eligible for this year’s Oscar nominations (“Selma” opened across the country on Jan. 9). When the Oscar nominations were announced on Jan. 15, “Selma” only received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Song, failing to nominate David Oyelowo for Best Actor, Paul Webb for Best Original Screenplay, and Ava DuVernay for Best Director. Was this the right move, or did “Selma” deserve those accolades?

“Selma” Movie Trailer

When it comes to the topic of the Oscars and “Selma” the best perspective is probably Spike Lee’s, who had this to say in an interview with The Daily Beast:

“You know what? Fuck ‘em… The validation is if your work still stands 25 years later.”

“Selma” has numerous virtues that make it one of the finest movies of the year. Ultimately, disentangling the Academy’s long history of poor picks, myopic racial politics, conservatism, and failures is worth critique, but not distress. “Selma” will survive.

Much more complicated than the politics of the Oscars is the current racial politics that have defined so much of the year in which “Selma” was released. Mass inequality, both in income and the justice system, combined with a series of police murders has resulted in nationwide protests that dwarf other recent grassroot movements like Occupy Wall Street.

“Selma” succeeds by capturing the same strategic complexity, confusion, and outrage as modern day protests. “Selma” avoids, as much as it is possible to avoid, a sense of inevitable victory. We so often act as if modern protests are more frustratingly ineffective, or more disruptive, or otherwise qualitatively different from the great movements of the past. “Selma” shows that this is not the case. Struggle was and remains a difficult and uncertain endeavor. The demonstrations in Selma that influenced passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 required a great deal of groundwork, optics, and internal conflict. “Selma” forces you to feel it.

The Martin Luther King Jr. of “Selma” (played by David Oyelowo) shatters the sanitized and naive view so many Americans hold of the Civil Rights Movement. “Selma” is not hagiography. Once a transformational figure—like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Abraham Lincoln—win their fights, they are no longer understood as controversial. The very society which had forced their hand begins a process of beatification that smoothes the rough edges from our radicals and makes them totems of society’s best attributes.

The Martin Luther King Jr. of “Selma” is the remarkable figure we’ve since enshrined, but the movie refuses him any easy moral authority (and even touches on some of the less flattering aspects of Martin Luther King’s biography), wrenching the viewer through his private struggles, family frustrations, and fears.

“Selma,” like Steven Spielberg’s 2012 movie “Lincoln,” challenges the illusion of goodness triumphing through the simple power of being right. In “Selma” Martin Luther King and the other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) spend as much time bickering with the Selma chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as they do trumpeting the pure righteousness of their cause.

“Selma” opens on a weary and battle-hardened Martin Luther King, a man who knows what needs to be done to draw cameras and the eyes of the nation, but has begun to buckle under the seeming ineffectiveness of their efforts.

The stakes in “Selma” are set right from the beginning, as Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah) goes to register to vote, only to be rebuffed for failing to answer outrageous “literacy” test questions.

Overturning the existing order is a dangerous and violent process, with one mid-movie scene illustrating the perils of believing that passion is enough to overturn unequal structures. Marchers unaffiliated with Martin Luther King Jr. stage a late night march, unaware that King’s savvy for PR draws the photographers that keep the police in check. The resulting carnage is not only shocking, but made more horrible by its well-intentioned ineffectiveness. The scene ends with the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson by Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler (who didn’t face justice until 2010).

“Selma” is very much a movie about political realities. It inspires us to discuss the here and now. As expected, “Selma” keeps a tight focus on the marches, culminating in the successful completion of a march from Selma to Montgomery, with the movie’s final speech delivered on the steps of the Capitol, a chagrined George Wallace observing. Less expected: “Selma” spends just as much time on the SCLC’s strategic leveraging of the marches to force the hands of President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson). “Selma” captures the complex truth that history is made both in the the streets and behind closed doors, each putting pressure on the other.

So “Selma” is effective at recapturing the vibrancy and radicalism of the Civil Rights Movement, but how is it as a movie?

The performances are universally excellent, with David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. carrying much of the drama, but supported by well-drawn characters like John Lewis (Stephan James) and Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch), not to mention the movie’s various villains, of which Tim Roth’s lizard-like Governor George Wallace is the standout.

Much of the success of “Selma” can and should be credited to director Ava DuVernay (who is rumored to have been responsible for much of the script as well) who makes every new victim feel like a punch to the gut. That “Selma” never feels schmaltzy, like the Disneyfied feel-goodism of “Remember the Titans” or “The Help,” is a testament to DuVernay’s complete mastery of tone. The amazing script (It’s astounding to discover that King’s speeches in the movie were all adaptation, rather than quotation) also deserves a great deal of credit, balancing between hope and political realities, and buoying David Oyelowo’s rhetorical presence with powerful words.

There’s no question that “Selma” deserved Oscar nominations for Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor (particularly with weak competition like “The Theory of Everything,” “Foxcatcher,” “The Imitation Game,” “American Sniper,” and “Birdman”). But “Selma” is good enough that it doesn’t matter. Our political discourse is made richer by “Selma,” assuring it a legacy of real world effect, rather than golden trinkets.