The issue has come to a head because over the past two years some films with a particular emotional resonance were passed over. The original “Rocky” (1976) won three Oscars, and Sylvester Stallone was nominated (though he did not win) for both acting and writing. Critics and fans alike have heaped praise on 2015's new addition to the Rocky franchise, “Creed”, which sees a black fighter as the hero. But the star and the black director, Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler, will have to make do with fans' appreciation and more than $100m at the box office: the film's only nomination went to Mr Stallone, this time for Best Supporting Actor. “Straight Outta Compton”, a hit film about a black hip-hop group with a black director and producer, was nominated only for its screenplay, the writers of which were white. “Beasts of No Nation” delighted our reviewer, and fans of its star, Idris Elba, hope he will be the next James Bond. It also brought a horrifying phenomenon, child soldiering in Africa, to Western audiences. But the Academy ignored it. All this happens in the shadow of last year's nominations, in which “Selma”, a film about the civil-rights movement which our reviewer found “remarkable”, was nominated but did not win Best Picture, as many thought it should. Neither its director, Ava DuVernay, nor its star, David Oyelowo, were recognised by the academy.

Fingers are pointing at the Academy’s 6,000-odd voting members, 94% of whom are white. Spike Lee, whose “Do The Right Thing” is considered one of the great movies not to have won an Oscar, has lamented “another all-white ballot”; Don Cheadle, who got a Best Actor nomination in 2004 for “Hotel Rwanda”, has joked dryly about parking cars at the event. It is possible that the only black actor onstage will be Chris Rock, who is hosting. He has already said that the Oscars seem to have become a white equivalent of the Black Entertainment Television awards.

These years are far from the first whitewashing in Oscars history: no actors from ethnic minorities were nominated in 1995 or 1997, or in an extraordinary streak between 1975 and 1980. Throughout the 20th century, 95% of Oscar nominations went to white film stars. It is an embarrassing anachronism that the prevalence of white Academy electors has been allowed to continue into the 21st century, a trend that the Academy's (black) president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, has vowed to end.

Could the “whiteout” be a statistical glitch? If the data were random, such a glitch would be hugely unlikely. A 2013 survey of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), an American union for film performers, suggests that 70% of its members are white. If all of the Guild’s members were equally likely to receive Oscar nominations, regardless of race, then over a two-year period 28 out of 40 nominations would be of white actors. The chances of no single person of colour being nominated across two ceremonies would be exceptionally small—even during a 15-year span, the odds of seeing at least one sequence of back-to-back whiteouts are around one in 100,000.