Kim Masters’ entire profile of Salim and Mara Brock Akil, who often work together (she writing, he directing) is worth a read, particularly for its analysis of the ways that two African-American Muslims found their ways into the movie and television industries, given how much we talk about gatekeeping and gatekeepers here. But I also wanted to highlight these three paragraphs, which I think say a great deal about the relative position in Hollywood of content that focuses on non-white characters, and the dynamics of writers’ rooms:

“Like anyone else in television, I like to explore my life experience,” Salim says. “And I don’t think African-American artists see doing shows or art about African-Americans as something ‘less than.’ I think maybe the industry sometimes does. We don’t get as much attention, we don’t get critical acclaim and so on. But as far as my perspective, it’s a natural thing. And it doesn’t limit me because all I’m really doing is telling American stories.”

Mara agrees, though she is dismayed that the actresses in Girlfriends did not get the awards recognition that she feels they deserved. And while she believes that much of her success derives from the spice of a diverse writers room, she gets annoyed that there is rarely a similar approach on shows that don’t have predominantly black casts. Kenny Smith, who worked with Mara on Jamie Foxx and is now an executive producer on The Game, says Mara relies on writers from different backgrounds and genders to create authentic emotional notes. And she doesn’t worry about political correctness. “When we’re developing stories in the room, she wants guys to be guys,” he says. “And if it’s sexist and ugly, she wants the women to respond as they actually would. It’s like, ‘Let’s not sugar-coat this.’ It’s always courageous.”

Mara is also aware that UPN launched Girlfriends — and other shows revolving around African-Americans — because they were seen as cheap audience magnets. She says new networks like UPN or Fox, back then, “didn’t believe you have to spend a lot of money to get [the audience] to come because we’re so hungry to see ourselves that we’ll just show up and find it. That is not the case, by the way.” But Mara says the experience taught her to do a lot with a tight budget.

It’s a mystery to me why any showrunner would be comfortable with a writers’ room with a narrow range of life experiences unless they’re doing an insanely tightly focused show about one sort of person, and if they were, why they’d even bother with a full room unless, like Aaron Sorkin, they need research monkeys. I just don’t have that kind of confidence. But then, I guess I don’t have the chutzpah to be asking for a couple million dollars a week to execute my storytelling vision, either.

Even before Meryl Streep, playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, beat Viola Davis, in a performance as a Mississippi domestic even The Help‘s detractors couldn’t help admire, for Best Actress, it was a racially awkward night at the Oscars.

The off notes began when Billy Crystal resurrected his Sammy Davis, Jr. impersonation for a Midnight in Paris sketch at the beginning of the show. The bit is just fine, but on a night that featured Octavia Spencer and Davis as acting nominees for The Help, and Gabourey Sidibe reflecting on how few women like herself she sees on-screen, it was an unfortunate reminder of how few parts are available for actual African-American actors. It didn’t help when, later in the telecast, Crystal joked that after seeing The Help “I wanted to hug the first black woman that I saw, which from Beverly Hills is about a 45-minute drive.” It might have been a crack on white, wealthy Los Angeles residents, but the joke didn’t have quite enough self-awareness about the persistence of segregation.

That same unease showed up in an otherwise very funny sketch about Hollywood focus groups that featured a group of cranky moviegoers dissecting The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know that it was unintentional, but an attendee played by Fred Willard kept talking about how he’d love a movie with more monkeys in it—and suggested the upcoming Gone With the Wind would benefit from the same additions. It was an unfortunate choice, pairing up that particular animal with the movie for which Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American actress to win an Academy Award. As Chris Rock reminded us, “If you’re a black man, you can play a donkey or a zebra.”

And the awkwardness wasn’t all black and white. Daniel Junge, who won an Academy Award for Feature Documentary for Saving Face, announced that as a white guy, he really ought to get out of the way for his Pakistani collaborator, journalist and documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy—and then kept talking, though he did let her have the majority of the time. The biggest missed opportunity of the night was the Academy’s chance to recognize Demian Bichir’s marvelous performance as an undocumented immigrant in Chris Weitz’s A Better Life, a profoundly personal issue movie that went underwatched this year. I don’t begrudge Jean Dujardin his Best Actor win, but it’s much more interesting to confound the Academy’s preconceptions about the people who are still acting as the help than it is to cater to their nostalgic self-conception.

Director Chris Weitz didn’t just make one of the best movies of 2011 with his tender exploration of the lives of undocumented immigrants, A Better Life. The process of making the film turned him into a dedicated advocate for immigration reform, reconnecting with his Mexican heritage and studying Spanish and economics so he can be a more effective advocate. And now Weitz has taken his experience in fiction and turned it to fact, directing a series of immigration reform ads pegged to Alabama’s insanely restrictive immigration law, for a coalition of groups that includes the Center for American Progress. I think this one is my favorite:

The whole campaign is doing a very good job of showing the harm that restrictive immigration laws cause to non-immigrants, whether they’re older white men who are close friends with undocumented families or black Alabamans who see hatred of immigrants as part of the unfulfilled promise of the Civil Rights movement. So-called special interests have such wider reach than we often acknowledge.

1. Most obviously, this is a deeply conventional list of nominees. Shame is a daring movie, but given its critical acclaim, Putting it somewhere in the mix wouldn’t have been so hard. The best director list is all dudes. And seriously, War Horse for best picture?

2. That said, if the Academy was going to take a risk with acting nods, I’m thrilled that it did so with Demian Bichir, whose performance as a immigrant father who risks deportation to get his truck and gardening equipment back after they’re stolen was one of the movies that moved me most deeply last year.

3. I’m glad to see the love for Bridesmaids, but frustrated by the lack of attention for Young Adult, which may lack toilet humor, but pushes into vastly different and more difficult places than the former. It’s very hard to watch Charlize Theron play the wildly selfish Mavis Grady, but she’s a much more daring and challenging so-called difficult woman than Lisbeth Salander or Maggie Thatcher.

4. Margin Call‘s Best Original Screenplay nod is fantastic news. It’s not just that this nervy, restrained financial thriller is a great, timely movie. It’s that the movie scraped forward on a combination of theatrical distribution and VOD, a triumph for a new model that could help more movies get to the audiences they deserve. Next to this, the nods for Ides of March for Adapted Screenplay is a disgrace.

5. Rise of the Planet of the Apes gets nominated in visual effects, rather than acting (not that it doesn’t deserve that nod, too) and Hollywood avoids a pressing question about its future yet again? At this point, I think another actor needs to give an undeniable performance in motion capture before the Hollywood community will come to consensus about how to define this new form.

I’ve sung the praises of A Better Life here before, but I really think that to appreciate it, you should watch it with Miss Bala, a terrific movie out of Mexico based on the true story of a beauty queen who became the pawn of a drug cartel. As I explain in The Atlantic this week:

In Carlos’s case, the efficient machinery set up by the United States government to deport undocumented workers has essentially no room for appeal. The volunteer lawyer who visits him recognizes that Carlos has all the makings of a solid citizen, but none of the resources to fight for an incredibly rare exemption to the rules that say he must be returned to Mexico. The most the system can bend is to give Carlos a moment with his son before shipping the gardener off in shackles.

If a state with something to offer citizens its citizens can afford this kind of callousness, a state that couldn’t care less about its people can be all the more harsh and arbitrary. And it turns out not to matter to the Mexican government that Laura’s been coerced, threatened with death, and raped. Treating her as a collaborator with the cartel makes for a more interesting news story, so after she tips off a powerful general of a coming attack, she’s imprisoned, trotted out before the news cameras, and ultimately abandoned on the streets of Baja California

Miss Bala is a great, unnerving story about Mexico, but it’s also a fascinating antidote to the Strong Female Character trope. Laura does tremendously brave things, and survives through intense violence, but instead of a cool, detached competence, we feel the terror that would be ours if we found ourselves in the same situation. There’s a morality to feeling the horror of the bad things you do to stay alive because you have no other choice.

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I assume almost none of you have seen A Better Life, which is too bad. Chris Weitz’s remarkably tender, tense chronicle of a few of days in the life of Carlos Galindo, an undocumented immigrant who sees his fortunes rise with the chance to purchase a truck that would let him start his own landscaping business, only to see them crumble when it’s stolen, is one of my favorite movies of the year. And Demian Bichir, who some of you may know from Weeds, just landed a Screen Actors Guild nomination for his performance as Carlos. It’s a remarkable performance, to a certain extent the inverse, and maybe the superior, of Michael Fassbender’s turn in Shame. Brandon spends most of his time in a forced placidness, and when his facade breaks, it shatters. Carlos, by contrast, is astonishingly, painfully open. In him you see that the tremendous privilege of the ability to be generous, the shock of the betrayal of that generosity, and the struggle to raise a son in a different life without losing him entirely.

Chris and Demian were kind enough to sit down with me for half an hour last week to discuss A Better Life and the politics of immigration reform in the United States. Our conversation appears here: