Motown manufactured melodrama

Rating: 3/10 (5 August 2017)

How can a movie as confusing as this be considered Oscar material. This is nothing like Bigelow's previous superb movies with its jumbled story and outright fiction presented as "truth". The screenwriter admits to "a self-imposed rule to never stray from what I understood to be the underlying truth of a scene or an event". What he termed poetic license, is nothing less than a license to lie. He also updated the dialogue, to what, modern terminology or assumed modern attitudes? Probably both.
Bigelow uses a broad brush dipped in the slime of three corrupt cops as an indirect implication projected 50 years later on today's police a la BLM hate. Just casting Will Poulter, who oozes bully/evil, as a cop, is pejorative. And yes the black victims deserved focus, but not to the point of marginalizing the massive violence, looting, vandalism, riots and murder. A major flaw was the fact that the victims stood up to the beatings and apparent/actual murder of some of them, rather than give up the dead moron in the parlor who had fired off a starter pistol in the middle of a riot. This is a canyon sized plot hole.
And in another piece of complete idiocy, one of the black singers is made to complain that Motown's music is just for white people. Ga! And yes it was an all white jury, but they found the black security guard to be innocent in like 8 minutes. But the white judge, who was later found to be personally corrupt, instructed the jury to either convict the cops on 1st degree murder (which was not the case), or render a not guilty verdict--2nd degree murder or manslaughter weren't options. Chalk another one up to the establishment, so of course none of that was mentioned.
What in the hell happened here? Was Bigelow found to have been too conservative in her previous efforts and forced to make a propaganda film, or is this her true self? Her emphasis can do nothing here but stir the rabble rousing pot which is already at the boiling point. So I guess yeah, it is Oscar material.