The Oscars will not have a presenter this year. Due to homophobic jokes that he had made a few years ago, the comedian and actor Kevin Hart, who was originally hired for the task, was no longer tenable. But even more than a person who will be giving the award ceremony on February 24th, this year someone missing out on the meaning behind the nominations (here you will find the overview) is missing.

Never known for cinephilia, the Academy chose 2019 as much precious scrap as rare. These include Bradley Cooper's dull "A Star is Born" variation, which plays supposedly soulless female pop against honest male music. But also the two nominations for "work without author" by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck leave one desperate (read here, which films our editorial team would have nominated.)

Why the almost entertaining failed film about a painter based on Gerhard Richter did not trigger a similarly sharp discussion about aesthetic responsibility to German history as Takis Würger's novel "Stella" recently or Jonathan Littell's "Die Wohngesinnten" more than a decade ago, can only be puzzling , Is film criticism so much less rigorous than literary criticism?

About angry white men laugh

Above all, however, Henckel von Donnersmarck's 188-minute biopic chunk looks even more dazzling alongside Pawel Pawlikowski's elegant 88-minute "Cold War" - both nominated for Best Camera and Best Foreign Language Film. You could say that as an artistic band that the Oscars try to cover. But the internal variance is too low for that.

Cinematic abstraction seems to the Academy only in glossy black and white to be able to enjoy - see the many "nods" for "Roma" and just "Cold War". By contrast, Barry Jenkins' brilliantly colorful 'If Beale Street Could Talk' film model, modeling both his black protagonists as archetypes and anchoring them in their racist presence, is one of the big losers in the nomination round.

Better then, the voters seem to have talked, the agitprop agitprop of "BlacKkKlansman" or "Vice", which makes one laugh about angry white men without having to reflect on his possible complicity in racism and populism.

Of course, the Oscars will never be able to satisfy all demands, neither aesthetic nor political diversity. This is not necessarily to their detriment: The fact that these claims are even raised at the price and heated debate about it, speaks for its continued relevance.

What about the directors?

It is equally clear that only the combination of other awards, especially those of international festivals, can provide a true overview of the highlights of global filmmaking. Cannes and Locarno, in particular, have provided an appropriate platform for Asian cinema in an outstanding year ("Shoplifters", "Burning", "A Long Day's Journey Into Night", "A Land Imagined").

However, the Oscars have one thing in common with international festivals: they ignore the work of women directors in a sustainable and vehement way. After the nomination of Greta Gerwig in 2018, the squad of candidates for Best Director is again purely male. Among the 29 feature films selected this year, only three are women: "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" by Marielle Heller, "Capernaum" by Nadine Labaki and "Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland" by Josie Rourke, the latter in technical categories alone.

Lack of options could not have been the case, major works by Debra Granik, Lucrezia Martel, Lynne Ramsay or Alice Rohrwacher had been on offer. But even in the tragi-comedy "Can You Ever Forgive Me," with Melissa McCarthy as the best actress and Richard E. Grant as the best supporting actor could enter the most prominent nominations, a mental barrier seems to have prevailed, the performances associated with Heller's directing power bring.

The barrier is called sexism - and when that will be overcome at the Oscars, is probably the most pressing question that must face the Oscars.