I think it goes without saying that Fassbender, playing a tortured, joyless, addicted masturbator, would not be nominated. To some degree, less perhaps in recent years, the Academy seems afraid the public will confuse the behavior of nominated characters with their own characters. They don’t want to be seen as sympathizing with masturbators.
Roger Ebert, probably expressing what I was thinking about Michael Fassbender’s snubbing by the Academy — it’s largely stuffy and has to do with outside perceptions of Hollywood being full of perverse, permissive libertines. Shame winning anything would somehow validate this.
They wuz robbed - Roger Ebert’s Journal