In the past 20 years, 120 films have received Academy Awards nominations for Best Picture. Of those nominees, only 17 featured nonwhite leads, and those characters were primarily athletes, entertainers, and criminals.

Is this evidence that a movie starring a white man is inherently better?

Do this year’s nominations mean there was only one good movie made by a black director in 2013?

Can the Academy only nominate one movie with a black star each year?

The answer to the first two questions is obviously, “No,” but digging deeper into that third question may uncover a real problem.

2013 was a good year for movies about the black experience, but it has not translated into Oscars recognition. 12 Years a Slave is likely to win the award for Best Picture tonight, but it is the only nominee in the category featuring any nonwhite lead. Many movie buffs were left shocked at the lack of nominations for two strong films with black lead actors: Lee Daniels’ The Butler and Fruitvale Station were completely shut out by the Academy.

Many argue that the oversight was simply due to the films’ midyear releases. Others, myself included, worry it may be something more. It would appear the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is suffering from the same problem as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which generated anger by awarding a Grammy to Macklemore over a collection of black artists. In response to the lack of recognition by both academies, some fans of the artists on the short end have cried “racism.”

I disagree. What’s at play here is not a matter of racism. To be racist is to knowingly bear resentment against a person for their ethnicity or the color of their skin. The Academy’s lack of recognition for The Butler and Fruitvale Station is not a malicious action to deny the artistic value of these works, but rather a subconscious prejudice against movies that are harder for these voters to relate to.

To be prejudiced is not to be racist. To have prejudice is not blatant or malicious. Every one of us has some kind of prejudice. The Academy has a prejudice, too. It suffers from a lack of understanding different cultures — a problem that is unavoidable in such an homogenous body: the members of the Academy are 94 percent white. (12 Years a Slave managed to overcome this prejudice, in part, because of its strong white supporting cast.)

Perhaps this is why Fruitvale Station received no love from the Academy. The old, rich, white folks who make up the voting body simply cannot relate to the everyday challenges in the life of Oscar Grant. The film, starring Michael B. Jordan as Grant, was hard for me, a white male, to get into at first. Grant, a 22-year-old man who was believed to have been a victim of police brutality, is shown unknowingly living his last day on Earth. Writer and director Ryan Coogler artfully tells Grant’s story in a raw and real way, showing the everyday life of a good, if flawed, man.

Fruitvale Station is just not the type of movie that I would typically enjoy. It felt almost too real, at times too mundane, and Grant was a man with whom it was difficult to sympathize at first. However, it wasn’t long before I found myself questioning the prejudice that plagued my view of the movie. As a regular movie viewer, I’ve become conditioned to expect certain things in my movies even as I profess to oppose that mentality. It took some time before I was able to look past the fact that the sets were dirty and the people weren’t all beautiful — that the world the characters lived in was my own, and that this story was not going to have a happy ending.

Our prejudice influences our immersion into movies. It’s only natural that we try to latch onto the character who is most like us when watching a film. We like to see ourselves as Captain Phillips or Dr. Ryan Stone as we wonder how we would handle the difficult circumstances these characters face. We find it easier to live vicariously through Jordan Belfort as he behaves extravagantly because it’s what any one of us would love to do if there were no consequences.

It is harder, though, to become engrossed in a film that is about a real life, not like our own: a tragedy, out of our hands, depicting someone who might not look like us. Perhaps it’s more difficult to watch when we realize the unthinkable story of Fruitvale Station took place as recently as 2009. Maybe watching that film made members of the Academy uncomfortable, unwilling to nominate it for a major award.

The Butler, however, had all the benchmarks of the type of movie the Academy would regularly reward. With beautiful cinematography, an all-star cast of actors both black and white, social commentary on the 1960s and 70s, and a true story about mistakes made by white people set right again by more white people. So why did Lee Daniels get snubbed?

My prejudice was no factor in thoroughly enjoying The Butler from beginning to end. Based very loosely on a true story, much like American Hustle, The Butler tells the story of Cecil Gaines, a White House domestic servant, as he leads his life and family through the tumultuous 20th century and the early years of the 21st.

Unfortunately for history fans, the most intriguing angle of The Butler was a complete Hollywood concoction. In order to show the changing social conditions in the United States from the 1950s to the current millennium, the movie also follows the story of Cecil’s son, Louis, as he joins the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and later, the Democratic Party as a nominee for Congress. Unfortunately, Louis Gaines was never a real person.

Eugene Allen, the man upon whom Cecil was based, was an actual White House butler for over 34 years. But unlike Cecil, Allen only had one son, who fought in and survived Vietnam. The character of Cecil is the father of two children, with the younger boy leaving to fight in Vietnam during the course of the movie. Still, these sorts of liberties are taken in many movies and can’t possibly be held up as an excuse for snubbing the film when American Hustle followed the same formula.

Obviously, not every movie can be nominated for Best Picture. Still, it seems like a slight against these two magnificent movies that neither was nominated when realistic stories about white men, like Nebraska and Captain Phillips, received their recognition from the Academy.

I am not arguing that either Lee Daniels’ The Butler or Fruitvale Station deserves to be awarded Best Picture. Neither was on the same level as 12 Years a Slave. Both movies, however, certainly deserve to be recognized ahead of some of the other Best Picture nominees.

While I don’t believe the Academy made malicious, racist decisions, I have to conclude that the slights given to these two movies were based on a subconscious prejudice that influences all of us. The diverse perspectives that can be brought together when a group of about 6,000 people vote on the best films of the year should counterbalance those prejudices. But that outcome is impossible when the Academy is 94 percent white, 77 percent male, and very old.