Just saw this one earlier today. I can verify that yes, the Oscars snubbed this film badly (I blame Dick Poop). It's extraordinary. Selma respects its audience's intelligence; it assumes that we'll be comfortable with flawed heroes, with a civil rights movement that isn't one monolithic entity, all of its members marching and protesting in complete unison all the way to equality. Similar to Spielberg's Lincoln, we get a strong sense of the backroom politics that propelled the movement forward (although I would argue that this is a superior film). Director Ava DuVernay finds room for some real stylistic flair in this film, particularly with the filming of the 'Bloody Sunday' sequence on the Edmund Pettus bridge.
There's been a lot of noise made about the treatment of LBJ and his role in the events depicted in this film. I'm far from an expert on the history, and I'm also not particularly invested in protecting the legacy of Johnson, so it didn't much affect my experience of the film. Writing in the New Yorker, Amy Davidson makes the point that if anything, the film does LBJ a big favor by not mentioning Vietnam at all, so my gut feeling is that the controversy is overblown. Regardless, I strongly recommend Selma.
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