Hey Hollywood! I’m white, female and pushing sixty, and I went to see Straight Outta Compton

I saw “Straight Outta Compton” on a sweltering August afternoon in Chicago, with my husband and my 24-year-old daughter, Rosie. Rosie was pleased when we chose that film. She is a particular sort of movie fan; she is suspicious of mainstream fare and she was afraid we would want to see a Captain America prequel or something. (Rosie only likes superhero movies if Joss Whedon directs them.) “Straight Outta Compton” has just the kind of edgy, independent vibe that appeals to her.

But that’s not why we went. My husband and I, both white, both pushing sixty (pushing hard, as it turns out), chose to see “Straight Outta Compton” because — check this out — we heard it was a good movie.

I’m having trouble with the general #OscarSoWhite discussion of this year’s Academy Award nominees, particularly as it relates to this film. Critics and pundits bemoan the lack of diversity, and then generally explain it all away, at least in part, by pointing out that Oscar voters are largely white men, with a median age somewhere around 64. The implication is that people like that wouldn’t be interested in a film about ground breaking hip hop artists, and really, who can blame them? Manohla Dargis of the New York Times helpfully points out that these Academy members were listening to, you know, the Beach Boys when they were teenagers, so how could they get N.W.A?

I’m starting to take all this a little personally.

Best I can tell, people in my age group are managing their lives pretty much the same way they did in their forties, except with fewer soccer games and science fair projects. We aren’t, as a group, slipping into some sort of cinematic senility. The Academy members among us are accomplished and celebrated filmmaking professionals; surely they can be expected to assess the merits of a movie without scratching their grizzled gray heads and saying, “I don’t know, man, I used to listen to the Beach Boys, so…”

Now it’s possible that some of these guys were too lazy to see “Straight Outta Compton,” or too racist, or that they admired the film but didn’t think it was the best movie they saw last year. But that thinking overlooks something obvious, which is that “Straight Outta Compton”– and to a lesser extent, “Creed,” and “Beasts of No Nation” — are the only films that come up regularly in this conversation. Just the three of them. Isn’t that a problem by itself, more so than the demographics of the Academy voters? Shouldn’t there be more notable films being made with diverse casts and crews?

Idris Elba’s remarkable performance in “Beasts of No Nation” wasn’t nominated. (If I was an Academy voter, I’d vote for Idris Elba, pretty much whatever he was in. I think he should be James Bond, too.) Idris Elba wasn’t nominated, but he did give a speech about diversity to Parliament recently, where he stated that the issue isn’t skin color, but the way the industry thinks. “So today,” he said, “I’m asking the TV & film industry to think outside the box, and to GET outside the box. This isn’t a speech about race, this is a speech about imagination. Diversity of thought.”

There’s a message Hollywood could take to the bank.

Back in August, when the end credits rolled on what had become a hot summer evening in Chicago, my daughter Rosie went on Yelp and found a nearby bar in a basement where they make some sort of fresh ground cocktails. We went there and toasted air conditioning and “Straight Outta Compton.”

It was a good movie.