Forget “Dreamgirls:� “Children of Men� was robbed!

Since I'm not paid to care about the Oscars, I generally don't. But the spectacle of hand-wringing over the snub of "Dreamgirls" is sort of amusing: Sure, it received eight nominations, more than any other film this year, but it didn't get the one that really counts, the Best Picture nod.

So, clearly, this is some sort of slam against some sort of minority group; in fact, it's a twofer: As it's a film about African-Americans directed by a gay man (Bill Condon) and embraced by the gay community, both blacks and gays are entitled to self-righteous umbrage today. (And if you're a gay African-American, well, my hat's off to you if your head hasn't already exploded.) Much as when "The Color Purple" led the pack in nominations but failed to win a single Oscar in 1986, or when "Brokeback Mountain," while considered the prohibitive favorite, lost the Best Picture Oscar last year to "Crash," which almost immediately was named One of the Worst Movies to Ever Win a Best Picture Oscar.

Here's the Daily News' Bob Strauss on the subject (I'd link to it, but there's no permalink feature in that blog, so it might be hard to locate without a whole lot of scrolling going on):

"If you've got to make a prejudice case for the "Dreamgirls" snub, perhaps homophobia sticks a little better. We all know that some academy voters were adamantly against giving best picture to "Brokeback Mountain" last year solely because of its sexual politics. And while there's nothing overtly queer in "Dreamgirls," it's a well-known favorite of gay men."

Fair enough, but there was also a measure of "Brokeback" burnout, of Academy members hearing for months that "Brokeback Mountain" was going to win Best Picture, no matter what, and, perhaps accepting that as gospel, decided they didn't have to cast their votes there after all. And, one should point out, homophobia scarcely prevented Condon from winning a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the overtly gay "Gods and Monsters."

And, after all, these films were nominated in the first place; I doubt a group as lumbering and uncool as the Academy could actually manage some kind of bizarre conspiracy where they get the hopes of sundry minority groups up with a bunch of nominations, only to sadistically quash them with no wins.

Props to the Academy, however, for an ingenious solution to boring Oscar races: Simply neglecting to nominate the prohibitive Best Picture favorite.

But what about Hollywood's notorious prejudice against sardonic nihilists? That's the only thing that can account for "Children of Men" receiving a mere three Oscar nominations (well, that and Universal's miserable campaign for the film, itself delineating the studio's own biases).

The film, which takes place 20 years in the future in a world even more dissolute than our current one (but only a smidgen more), famously contains three action set pieces apparently shot in one flowing, continuous take, an act of imagination and engineering that alone should put director Alfonso Cuaron amongst the Best Director nominees. (Cuaron and some collaborators did manage a nomination for their screenplay.) The film also got a well-deserved nomination for its cinematography, as well as one for editing. Editing? Didn't I just explain that the most amazing moments in this film aren't the result of editing?

Well, great, it's come to this -- I'm trying to talk the film out of winning an Oscar it might possibly win in favor of one that it has no chance of winning. Still, the decisions that led to the nomination were those of the director, not editor.

And, Best Song? How do you not vote for "Running the World," which someday somewhere could be some country's national anthem? I'd've paid real money to watch the beads of sweat form on ABC executives during Jarvis Cocker's performance of the song, as they hovered fretfully over the guy monitoring the seven-second delay, hoping to high heaven that he'd be able to dump the audio early and often through that minefield of lyricism.