SELMA

David Oyelowo’s performance as Martin Luther King won him a Golden Globe nomination but was ignored by Bafta (apparently because the film opened rather late) and the Oscars for no reason that anyone can discern. This is astonishing and lamentable because Oyelowo is superb, quite as good as any of either organisation’s nominees for best actor.

The film, directed by Ava DuVernay, tells of the famous 50-mile civil rights march, led by King, from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital Montgomery in 1965. It opens with King receiving his Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and moves swiftly to Alabama where a black woman (Oprah Winfrey) is denied her right to vote by a racist white lackey.

This is the crux of the matter: blacks were entitled to vote but virtually unable to do so because of obstacles placed in their way by white officialdom.

To put this right, King asks President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to push the Voting Rights Act through Congress but he refuses, saying he has more pressing matters to deal with. As critics have pointed out, this is unfair to LB J, whose civil rights record was excellent, but dramatically it works, building up considerable suspense and tension.

Events then move to Selma, where a non-violent demonstration is attacked by the police and King himself is arrested. But this is not his only problem. George Wallace (Tim Roth), the racist governor of Alabama, is deeply opposed to civil rights and the FB I director, J Edgar Hoover, wants to discredit King, whom he regards as ‘a political and moral degenerate’.

To this end he tries to fuel the suspicions of King’s wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo) that her husband is unfaithful. What emerges from this is a fascinating, deeply layered film about a significant event in American history in which, remarkably, the leading actors – Oyelowo, Wilkinson, Roth and Ejogo – are all British. So is the co-writer of the screenplay, Paul Webb.

The climax, of course, is the march – actually three of them. The first ended on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma when Alabama state troopers attacked the unarmed marchers with clubs, tear gas and other weapons. There’s a great deal of white on black violence in this movie.

The second was halted by King on the same bridge to avoid any more violence but the third, juxtaposed with footage of the actual 1965 march, ended in triumph and the passing of the law that King had demanded.

Selma is a powerful and important film which, bearing in mind recent police brutality against blacks in America, has considerable relevance today. It was nominated for two Oscars – best picture and best music – but why the director and cast, Oyelowo in particular, were overlooked is mystifying.

Oyelowo has had a successful career in film and television (he was Danny Hunter in the TV series Spooks) but Selma gave him his biggest break and he seized it with utter confidence. Pity it took an American film and an American director to let him show what he can do.