It's Oscar time!

and the Associated Press finds another way to make sure we understand what's important in the world today.

This year's Oscars are the most diverse ever

Look, diversity's fine in so far as it goes - I'm not disturbed in the slightest if all the nominees for the Oscars are black or hispanic or asian or whatever. To begin with, the Oscars are a celebration of narcissism and kindergarten politics. Second, I'm in favor of the awards going to people who performed best in the movies that year, and the color of their skin or their background is completely irrelevant.

The undertone of the whole piece, however, strikes me as the kind of pie-in-the-sky, look we're all one world crap that the diversity mafia have been cramming down our throats for the last thirty years. The fact is, the Oscars were created by the American film industry to acknowledge the best in American film. It happens to include all these other people now, and that's fine, but I feel like the AP thinks this is how things ought to have been all along.

Maybe it's paranoid, but I feel like next year there'll be a story complaining if the nominees aren't as diverse as this year. The industry remains overwhelmingly American, near as I can tell. There are plenty of foreign actors to be sure, but if there's a new crop of movies starring American, white actors, will there be a complaint that it's not reflective enough of world society?

I guess what's bugging me about the headline and the article is the pursuit of diversity for diversity's sake. By itself, diversity is merely a vehicle for hucksterism and not-at-all veiled racism. What I want out of people is competence, regardless of skin color or ethnicity. In a truly diverse and open society (as America is now, whatever some may say) the diversity of the candidates would not need to be mentioned. It only has to get brought up by people hyperconscious of the ethnicity of the people they're covering.

Ah, maybe I'm just being overanalytical.