So my prediction is that both Selma and Boyhood will be nominated for Best Picture in the Oscars, they will be the two runaway favorites, and their status as such will prompt an endless, wearying, vituperative inter-liberal squabble that will bring out absolutely everything wrong with contemporary media progressivism. It’s going to suck so hard. We’re in for a months-long trip on the Problematic Hot Take Express.

And I’m not even predicting an outcome, here. I’m not picking a favorite. Both movies are going to be hurt by this. If Selma wins, it’ll get people whining that it only won because of political correctness, which sucks, but it’ll also get the more subtle liberal version, where people condescendingly refuse to evaluate the movie’s actual virtues and secretly make their appreciation all about them. If Boyhood wins, it’ll get destroyed for being about white self-obsession, mostly by self-obsessed white writers. They’ll be infected with the modern contagion where everything becomes a symbol of culture war. The only thing worse for these movies than losing will be winning.

We’re not going to get to actually appreciate them as movies. Selma has already rapidly become one of those artistic objects that our chattering class will not allow to exist simply as art, and instead is used as a cudgel with which to beat each other over various petty ideological sins. I’d like to just watch it, first, before I have to run it through the second-order meta meat grinder. Yes, I get it, there’s a debate to be about the nature of history and the responsibility of nonfiction film makers to stick to it. (And I’ll just mention that most people seem to be on literally the opposite side of the fence they were when it came to Lincoln and the question of historical accuracy, and along predictable political grounds.) That stuff’s important. But the way we argue about these things now, where your opinion on Beyonce is this all-encompassing acrostic on who you are as a political and moral being, is least likely to actually produce insight.

So much of this is going to proceed from the fact that our media is filled with people who presume to speak for those who lack privilege but who enjoy it themselves, racial and economic privilege. The difference in stakes between those who suffer under racism and classism and most of those who just write about them distorts the conversation over and over again. Which leads to things like last year, where people preemptively complained about the racism inherent in 12 Years a Slave not winning, whining about American Hustle and white privilege, and then actually seemed disappointed when 12 Years did win. You know you’re a privileged person when the fun of complaining about injustice outweighs the pleasure of a just outcome.

Could there be a national conversation the various issues playing out here that was edifying, smart, and meaningful? Sure. Will there be? Hahahaha, no! There’s tons of important things to be said about the relationship between art and politics, about the continuing racism of Hollywood, about what it means to be universal in the way that Boyhood is frequently praised for (and largely black films usually aren’t), about what it means to be Oscar-bait in the 21st century…. But I can pretty much guarantee you that we won’t have an effective conversation about any of it, because lately our whole apparatus seems broken. When those two cops got killed in NYC, I thought to myself, “we are not equipped for this.” I knew we did not have it in us, as a national conversation, to talk about it in a productive way. Obviously, the stakes there were far higher. But more and more, I feel like the problem is not just that we live in a broken world, but that our systems for talking about how to fix it are broken themselves. Even the daily outrage cycle seems more exhausted than destructive, at this point. Everybody’s spent.

I’m just gonna tap out, on this one. I’m just gonna avoid all of the takes to come. I haven’t got it in me.