Dear Oscars, I Love You. But We Need to Talk.

O.K., but what’s to roll my eyes at? Welcome to the Nth Annual Academy Awards! I hear that. This might be a reductive way of looking at the Oscars. Math is just organizing the preferences and passions of about 9,000 people. Why’s race such a factor now? Well, for one thing, when it comes to the Oscars, there is some accounting for taste. And this year, the problem isn’t with the particular remaining movies — “1917,” “Ford v Ferrari,” “The Irishman,” “Jojo Rabbit,” “Joker” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” — or the white people in them. Not since my wish list and Walkman days, have I despised so few nominees in this category. Most of them I love. As for the one failure, I’ve never worked harder to get with the program. But after four tries, I gave up. ‘The Joker,” quite often literally, has no clothes.

Assembled, these distinct movies become a representative entity, and a person like me notices a theme that could poke out an eye. And whiteness is part of that story. It’s always been, of course. But this year feels different. A homogeneity has set in. The nominated movies start to look like picture day at certain magnet schools. “Jojo Rabbit” is a Hitler Youth comedy! Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time …” is a dream about the accidentally heroic pre-emption of racist Charles Manson’s murder plot. And “Little Women” quietly dramatizes the freedom white women experience after the men have left to fight a war; a war to end the enslavement of black people. Sounds a little too ironic, and yet the movie means us to understand the irony. Those white ladies are better off than any black people. They’re just not equal to the women’s enlisted brothers, fathers and beaus. The border between their time and ours has a gusty permeability.

Some of what’s so strong about “The Irishman” and “Once Upon a Time …” comes from how remembered they both feel — rue-soaked in the first movie; heavy with “what if” in the other. At the movies (in the West), the convenient thing about the past is that you can solve the matter of race by pretending it doesn’t exist. Most of these movies, in addition to their thematic rearview, are based in actual history. (“1917” sends two British World War I soldiers on a critical, thrillingly stressful postal mission.) You can’t put nonwhite people in places they weren’t — and when a movie does, you get something mildly anarchic like a biracial Jewish New Zealander having a ball playing Hitler.

Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time …” has a great line; as they wait for their car, Brad Pitt tells a weepy Leonardo DiCaprio, “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” Their white American maleness is too mythic and valuable to go around blubbering all over valets. “Joker” is about a comedian, but it doesn’t have Tarantino’s sense of humor about its whiteness. Whiteness here is a tragic, symbolic condition. Overlooked, unseen, under-medicated, Joker, and eventually his disciples, discover that being a guy with a carnival-ready white face helps get him the attention he wants. And even though this is the only movie of the bunch (the only non-Korean, Hitler-free movie) to feature even remotely meaningful parts for nonwhite actors (a bunch of Latinos beat up Joker in the opening minutes; his social worker and neighbor are black women), guess what: He kills a lot of them!