This year, there is an elephant in the room. I have asked that elephant to leave.

So said Cheryl Boone Isaacs in her opening statements at this year’s Oscar Luncheon, a star-studded celebration of the cream of the crop as dictated by the Academy. But, that elephant won’t, it can’t, and it shouldn’t leave. In the class photo of this year’s Oscar nominees, one notes the overwhelming whiteness of the nominees. The elephant isn’t in the room. The elephant is the room.

Numbers are abstractions. One can say that 64% of America is white and this percentage of Oscar nominees are white, and it seems like a tragedy. Visual pie charts, tables, and graphs reduce everybody to a numbers game, but rarely present data that fully grasps the reality of the situation. Spike Lee can say “we’re not at the table” and DGA can say “83% of directors are white and male,” but nothing fully illustrates the reality quite like the racial makeup of the class photo, which looks closer to the demographic makeup of a Trump Rally than a representative cross-section of America.

When minorities say they can’t get a foot in the door, one only has to look at this photo as representative of just how “exclusive” Hollywood can be.

Because #OscarsSoWhite is hanging around this time, the nominees were asked about the racial controversy. Noted straight woman playing a lesbian, Rooney Mara, dodged the racial question by going to bat for homosexual representation citing #OscarsSoStraight, which…thank you, but the conversation of the year is about minorities, not gays. Other people dodged the question. But, one person took it on.

Sylvester Stallone, who came under fire during the Golden Globe Awards for not thanking either director Ryan Coogler or star Michael B. Jordan on stage, was the only one to broach the subject. When asked about #OscarsSoWhite, Stallone said he had deferred to Coogler for the actions he should take. He said, “I said, ‘If you want me to go, I’ll go. If you don’t want me to go, I won’t.’ He said, ‘I want you to go.’ Because that’s the kind of guy he is. He wanted me to stand up for the film.”

Let’s be fair to the nominations of this year, there are few complete whiffs in this bunch. Well, OK, I think Spotlight was a terrible miss and The Revenant is a crock, but even they both have strong defenders, and have solid elements within them (Spotlight was well acted, The Revenant is impeccably lensed). Nobody is completely undeserving of the nomination, and #OscarsSoWhite is not about taking away value from the nominees. #OscarsSoWhite is about pointing out the privilege, underrepresentation, and diversity problems that plague the Hollywood good ol’ boy (read: Jim Crow) system of making movies. Few facts can communicate this problem as well as the above photo of this year’s Oscar nominees.