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Last year, repeat nominees in acting were Daniel Day Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Julie Christie, Cate Blanchett (2 nods), Laura Linney, Javier Bardem, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Tom Wilkinson.

That means only 9 acting nominees were not already members or had likely been invited… or less than a third of the general number of acting invitees each year. Seems like an easy get.

But The Academy Actors’ Branch invited only 7 total actors last year. Seven! When they, according to Cieply, usually invite roughly 28.

And the actors who were invited show no leaning towards Cieply’s alleged new bias at The Academy. Of the 7 actors invited in last invitation period, four were foreign born. But I think anyone would have to say that Sacha Baron Cohen and Jet Li are definitively in the “Buddy Hackett camp” more so than the elite indie camp. Ray Winstone’s run of The Departed, Beowulf, Indiana Jones IV, and Fool’s Gold would suggest that he is spending more time in the Hollywood commercial camp than not these days. And Marion Cotillard? Well… that is when you realize that the choices being made are not quite a cut and dried as Cieply would like to make them.

The American actors invited in were Josh Brolin (now a leading figure amongst younger actors), Ruby Dee (a veteran whose membership seems too slow in coming, in retrospect), and Allison Janney, a tremendous actress who also makes one wonder, as she is better known for television and stage than film and like other examples from Juno, seems to be the odd person out who became the odd person in.

This is all interesting, at least to me. It’s odd. And it does seem to suggest the Acting Branch having some oddball agenda, made odder by the failure to invite half the number of people they are normally allotted. This is an interesting, if industry navel gazing, story. But this is not what Cieply wrote about. And this is where I run into problems with New York Times editing on Hollywood so often. You read the story and they threw the kitchen sink at this year’s invites… and created a story that doesn’t actually seem to exist, but does seem to clearly fit the proposition that some have made, that there is some reason why indies (which aren’t indies, in reality) are getting more nominations than studio films and that the membership of The Academy is being skewed to achieve that result.

But it’s just not there in the facts.

So Cieply did exactly what McCain/Palin did in the election… they tried to build a case via guilt by association. Mr Smith is very tall… so is his first son, Joe… but his brother Bill is not… so clearly the mother was cheating on the father when she was impregnated with Bill. They don’t mention that Mrs. Smith’s family is mostly short and that it is not unreasonable to expect that her genes won the fight once… because if you mention that, you are undermining your hypothesis. But as journalists, the job is to sell that hypothesis with a read of the real and complete facts, not the convenient ones.

Or maybe you agree that Ruby Dee and Jet Li and Sacha Baron Cohen are obsessed with European indies and that this is all an effort to skew the survey by Tom Hanks, star of Da Vinci Code II.

And look at the full list of Actors Branch invitations from last year: Jennifer Aniston, Adriana Barraza, Steve Carell, Daniel Craig, Aaron Eckhart, Chiwetel Ejiofor, William Fichtner, Ryan Gosling, Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Hudson, Danny Huston, Eddie Murphy, Christopher Plummer, James Rebhorn, Michael Sheen, Maribel Verdu

Who is Cieply complaining about… James Bond or the two Dark Knight actors or the three foreign names on the list of 16? The odd thing that stands out to me is that it took that long for Eddie Murphy or Christopher Plummer to get in, invited along with Maribel Verdu, a wonderful actress who has had two high-profile American releases in her entire career.

I mean, yes, it is a big blurry mess. But simplifying it to within an inch of all loss of logic isn’t the answer.

Cieply throws out a foreign name and a woman (hmmm) to illustrate the choices in the Director’s Branch. But what is the real story?

In the last four rounds of invites, there have been 25 directors invited in. Twelve (Sergei Bodrov, James Gray, Michael Haneke, Kimberly Peirce, Oliver Hirschbiegel, Walter Salles, Alejandro Amenábar, Monte Hellman, Werner Herzog, Nicole Holofcener, Bennett Miller, Gavin Hood ) have been on the “arty” side. Thirteen have been pure commercial Hollywooders at this point in their careers (Doug Liman, Peyton Reed, Jason Reitman, Gore Verbinski, Marc Forster, Andy Tennant, Joel Zwick, Peter Berg, D.J. Caruso, Antoine Fuqua, Paul Greengrass, Simon West, Mark Waters).

But again… look closer! Of the twelve artistes, seven had major studio releases or were shooting studio releases when invited in, and an eighth is a classic filmmaker being invited in at the end of his run. (Also, another one is a female director, which is a narrow category that probably should be embraced and emphasized.)

Of the twelve “studio guys,” six made their bones in a major way in what would be seen as indies, with Joel Zwick having the rarest of things... a $200 million+ indie, Forster bringing indie thinking to Bond, Liman’s Go bring him and others to the studio world of excess, Greengrass’ handheld doc style film making him studio bait, Waters segueing from Parker Posey Land, and Reitman’s $100 million+ grosser being small enough for Indie Spirit wins.

So how is the story what is going on in The Academy and not how the business actually works? Who gets to judge where Gavin Hood goes after winning an Oscar for Tsotsi and then making Rendition and Wolverine? Is his South African heritage really what the New York Times is concerned about?

Another offensive assertion is: “Expansion among the executives, and to a lesser degree among publicists, occurred in part as seven Sony Pictures executives made the cut despite — or perhaps to help reverse — a long streak without a best picture nominee from its lead Columbia Pictures division.”

Wait. Is the New York Times really asserting that membership in The Academy are going to change the strategy of studios as regards The Oscars? Is there an ounce of proof in that? A micro-nano of proof? An intelligent idea?

And again, why is Cieply making assertions that in their own wording go against the facts? He argues that the executive ranks expanded, but this is, to a lesser degree because of publicists. But then he smacks Sony, who got in five publicists/marketers and three other execs over the last four inviting rounds... including the two heads of worldwide marketing, the two co-presidents of the studio, and the co-ceo of the studio. Is there a member of that group that Cieply thinks The Academy should leave out or that should have been superseded by a Buddy Hackett candidate?

What does turn up as interesting as you look at the last few years of membership offerings is the number of people who were invited whose companies are now, for the most part, out of the business. With due respect to Stephanie Kluft and Sidney Kimmel (Stephanie being the veteran of longer standing, though stepping up in rank at Kimmel), they have spots in The Academy that are not going to be rescinded because SKE fell on hard times. Same with Gail Berman, who is back in TV after two years running a studio. But what was the alternative?

And there are dozens of other anomalies. How does Heidi Ewing get in without her doc partner, Rachel Grady? How, going back a few years, do you really no invite in Bob Yari, whether you like him or not?

In the end, it is a bunch of committees making a bunch of decisions with a bunch of biases that make for a bunch of head scratchers. And there are many more interesting stories to be mined out of the list of invitations and non-invitations.

But The Paper of Record has the power to set in stone the notions that they decide are real. Even smart people like Patrick Goldstein is too busy enjoying the smackdown (“A charming, gregarious man when he's not trying to defend the academy's many missteps, Davis simply bobbed and weaved…”) to actually think about what the real story is. (Of course, had an evil blogger done the story, it would have been fullof idiotic missteps. Yawn.) And it passes because no one wants to fight about it. And this is how Sharon Waxman and her then editor, Michael Cieply, foisted the LIE of The Slump on Hollywood for years… and why some people still believe it happened.

Why isn’t the truth enough?