Well, the Academy Award nominations are out and the usual backbiting, second-guessing, infighting and company town politics are on display. That’s bad enough, but in today’s hyper-partisan America everything is politicized from Michelle Obama’s suggestion that kids exercise and eat right to the Academy Awards.

First, “Selma” is a fine movie. Should British newcomer David Oyelowo have received a nomination for his portrayal of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Unquestionably. It is certainly worthier, for instance, than Steve Carell’s creepy John du Pont in “Foxcatcher.”

But quality is often less important in Oscarland that trendiness, unexpectedly playing against type, rewarding industry favorites or correcting earlier neglect. So, Benedict Cumberbatch gets a nomination for being the new “It” boy, Michael Keaton for still being around and as good as ever, Bradley Cooper for being more than the “Hangover” guy and Carell for being more than a forty-year-old virgin. “Look, they’re acting,” the Academy seems to be saying.

I have noted that it is increasingly hard to get nominated, even playing a Civil Rights icon, if you don’t have a crippling or fatal disease, psychological problems, an addiction or belong to a trending discriminated against group. So one nominee plays a working woman screwed by a discriminatory system, another a gay man facing criminal penalties, others play sufferers from ALS, PTSD, Alzheimer’s, paranoia, sociopathology and substance abuse. In fact eight out of ten best actor and actress nominees are messed up, and several supporting nominees are along for the ride.

As to the argument that since no black actors were nominated the Academy is racist, that’s a bit of a stretch. The Academy is dominated by old, white, men who predictably behave like old white men, industries and political parties. They tend to favor their own kind. It may not be just, but it is the way of the world.

Some commentators have treated it as tantamount to a Staten Island chokehold. Others have demanded reform to make sure it never happens again. But how would that work? Quotas? That opens a can of worms because no Muslims, Hispanics, Hindus, Jews, Asians or Native Americans were nominated either. Few comedies ever get nominated as best picture and almost none have ever won. Maybe we need a Society for the Advancement of Comedy. I’d join that.

Or we could calm down and relax. The Academy is just guild or public relations agency. It’s like the Augusta National Country Club of movies, few minorities are members and its policies are misguided, stodgy, behind the times and out of touch. Who cares? Go to the movies you like and don’t watch the telecast. A look back suggests the Academy always plays it safe and rarely gets it right.

These are the guys whose picks for best picture have included “Rebecca” rather than “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The Great Dictator,” “How Green Was My Valley” instead of “Citizen Kane,” “Rocky” rather than “All The President’s Men,” “Taxi Driver” or “Network,” “The Sound of Music” instead of “Dr. Zhivago,” “Going My Way” instead of “Double Indemnity.” And the list of actors who never won is long and embarrassing, headed by Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter O’Toole, Garbo, Bacall, Annette Bening, Peter Sellers, Michelle Pfeiffer. Directors overlooked is even worse — Hawks, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Altman, Chaplin, Lumet, Bergman, Fellini, and Orson Welles..

So take a deep breath, look at this year’s list and realize your taste is better than that of the Academy, the same people who 48 out of 52 weeks a year bring you ultra-violence, comic books and adolescent dirty jokes. Sure Oyelowo should have been nominated for best actor, but so should Tom Hardy in “The Drop, Jake Gyllenhaal in “Nightcrawler” and Phillip Seymour Hoffmann in “A Most Wanted Man.” Mark Ruffalo and Keira Knightly were far better in “Begin Again” than in their nominated roles. And where are Alfred Molina and John Lithgow from “Love is Strange” and the wonderful Naomi Watts as a pitch perfect pole-dancing, pregnant Russian hooker in “St. Vincent”? I could go on, but make your own list.

A second Hollywood embarrassment emerged this week as Michael Moore and Seth Rogen became caricatures of clueless liberal bias by dissing “American Sniper.” Rogen, auteur of cultural landmarks like “Pineapple Express,” compared Clint Eastwood’s austere, unflinching study of the price of war to Nazi propaganda. And Moore opined that snipers are cowards who shoot people in the back.

What’s he want? A return to dueling? Are strategic bombers, roadside IEDs, ICBMs, long range artillery, flame-throwers more noble? No, war is all hell. And as Patton memorably said “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

What these loony criticisms demonstrate is that ideological zealotry blinds people to the evidence of their own senses. Rogen and Moore didn’t see the movie Eastwood made. Film art, like this example, seeks to hold a mirror up to nature, to force the viewer to confront tragedy and to experience, according to the Greeks, pity and terror. This “American Sniper” does.

No doubt super-patriots will only see “American Sniper” as a solemn ode to duty, honor, country. Lefties will take it as a sick glorification of war and jingoism. Fair-minded viewers will surely regard it as a complicated and disturbing mediation on our troubled times and the human condition. It is simultaneously an awed and agonized look at the courage it takes to enter the savagery of war and at the price it exacts.

But it is also surely a cautionary tale about never asking men to enter into such a brutal, bloody, dehumanizing endeavor lightly, carelessly, hastily, ill-advisedly, but as the Book of Common Prayer says of marriage “reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.” It costs the men and their country too much to do otherwise and the reverberations go on for years or decades.