Steve McQueen, the writer-director of “Shame,” thinks Americans' aversion to the film’s explicit content is responsible for Michael Fassbender being denied an Oscar nod for his portrayal of the film’s sex addict protagonist.

"In America they're too scared of sex, that's why he wasn't nominated," McQueen complained in an interview with the UK’s Press Association. "If you look at the Best Actor list you're saying, 'Michael Fassbender is not on that list?' It's kind of crazy. But that's how it is, it's an American award, let them have it."

In fact, the Best Actor Oscar may not be an “American award” this year since there’s only a 40 per cent chance of an American winning it. Of the five nominees, Demián Bichir (“A Better Life”) is Mexican, Jean Dujardin (“The Artist”) is French, and Gary Oldman (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”) is English. George Clooney (“The Descendants”) and Brad Pitt (“Moneyball”) are the Americans in the frame.

The issue of people in Americans being “scared of sex” in the HBO era is specious. Some Americans are no doubt scared of sex, while quite a few clearly are not.

McQueen’s case might have been stronger if he had restricted his comments to the actors in the Motion Picture Academy who vote for their peers and have traditionally displayed a puritanical streak. The only lead actors they have nominated in recent years whose roles have been bound up with sex are Woody Harrelson of  “The People vs. Larry Flynt” (1996) and Heath Ledger of “Brokeback Mountain” (2005), though freedom of speech was the impetus of Harrison’s Flynt and romantic love drove Ledger’s Ennis.  Overtly sexual performances by women are also rare, though Halle Berry won Best Actress  for “Monster’s Ball” (2001) and Julianne Moore was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category for “Boogie Nights” (1997). Sex was the dominant need for neither of their characters.  

Academy voters  are not immune to addiction stories. The heroin junkie  played by Frank Sinatra in “The Man With the Golden Arm” (1955) and the alcoholics played by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in “Days of Wine and Roses” (1962) and Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995) were all nominated. Sexual addiction, though, is still saddled with an unsavory tang; regarded as a moral failing rather than a psychological illness, the culture at large looks down on it. For the same reason that Greg Kinnear wasn’t Oscar-nominated for his troubling portrayal of “Hogan’s Heroes”' satyromaniacal star Bob Crane in “Auto Focus” (2002), Fassbender wasn’t nominated for his Brandon.

And yet “Shame” also was passed over by the Academy because it’s patchy and awkward. When he’s on mission, seeking or having sex or trying to fend off his needy, broken sister (Carey Mulligan), Fassbender is scintillating. But even he can’t salvage the awful bar scene in which his boss (James Badge Dale) ineptly tries to pick up a woman, or the embarrassingly coy one, characterized by inauthentic dialogue, in which he walks along a sidewalk with the colleague (Nicole Beharie) he’s dating. The writing at these points is so slipshod that the actors were left high and dry; Mulligan suffers from the same problem in several of her scenes. McQueen is more assured directing wordless sequences as he showed on “Hunger” (not that the 24-minute debate between Fassbender’s Bobby Sands and Liam Cunningham’s Father Dominic wasn’t impressive).

Maybe if McQueen wants to guide actors to Oscar nominations he should direct silent films. Why let the French take all the glory?

Below: Michael Fassbender and Nicole Beharie in the sidewalk scene