Spike Lee at Governors Awards: It’s Easier For a Black Person to Be President Than a Hollywood Studio Head
Spike Lee accepting his Honorary Oscar
Just before the 7th annual Governors Awards on Saturday night, honoree Spike Lee told Yahoo Movies one thing about his acceptance speech: “I won’t be reading off a teleprompter, that’s for sure.” The 58-year-old writer-director was on hand to collect his Honorary Oscar at the Hollywood event, where he was being honored along with Gena Rowlands and Debbie Reynolds (who shared a recorded message since she was not in well enough health to attend).
Lee was introduced by actor Samuel L. Jackson, who credited the auteur with taking his career to the next level with the films School Daze and Do the Right Thing. “His politics are the politics of an American anarchist in a way,” he said. “I like that about him.” Jackson was flanked by Jungle Fever star Wesley Snipes and Denzel Washington, star of Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues and Malcolm X. “Spike Lee put more African-Americans to work in this business than anyone in the history of this business,” Washington said.
Once Lee took the stage, he echoed that thought: “If I got in, I was gonna try to bring as many [black] motherf—ers with me as possible.” He remembered a time when he prodded the all-white Teamsters crew working on Malcolm X to hire black workers. “I knew I had to make change like that or we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
Lee (right) with Wesley Snipes, Samuel L. Jackson, and Denzel Washington
Still, there’s more change needed, he argued. “People in positions of hiring, you better get smart. Your work force better reflect what this country looks like,” he said. “We need to have a serious discussion about diversity and get some flava up in this,” he said of the film industry, adding, “It’s easier to be the President of the United States as a black person than to be the head of a studio.”
Lee spoke of his great-great grandmother, who was a slave, and thanked his late grandmother Zimmie Shelton, who taught art for 50 years, but “never had one white student due to Jim Crow laws.” Shelton paid Lee’s way through college with money saved from her Social Security checks and also helped fund his early films, including his first feature, 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It.
“There’s no such thing as an overnight success,” said Lee, adding that he “had to be ten times better than [his] white classmates” in order to excel — a lesson he said he shares with his own students at NYU film school where he is a tenured professor.
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Lee received his first Oscar nomination in the Screenplay category for Do the Right Thing, the seminal 1989 drama about race relations in Brooklyn. He also shared a nomination in 1998 with Samuel D. Pollard for the documentary 4 Little Girls about the deadly 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Lee’s next movie will be the Dec. 4 Amazon production Chi-Raq, a drama about gang violence in Chicago that has already drawn criticism from the city’s mayor for its title that compares inner-city Chicago to Iraqi war zones.
Hosted by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Governors Awards on Saturday was solemn in the wake of Friday’s Paris terror attacks. During his speech, Lee wished the people of France “peace and love."
(Photo: Kevin Winter/ Getty Images)
