Spike Lee on Oscar speech: ‘Gonna try to keep positive’
Brooklyn-based filmmaker Spike Lee says he hasn’t had time yet to plan what he’ll say when he gets his honorary Oscar next month — he’s busy trying to finish up his new movie “Chiraq” for a year-end release. But he promises he’s “gonna try to keep positive.”
Still, that hardly means that Lee — at times a quite vocal critic of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — thinks that all is perfect in Hollywood in terms of diversity.
“This is my belief,” the filmmaker said in a recent interview. “Until people of color get into those positions that I call the gatekeepers, that’s where true fundamental progress will be made. Because right now … we are not in the room where those decisions are being made, what gets made and what doesn’t. I mean, I’m still waiting for somebody to tell me, is there a person of color at a Hollywood studio, at a cable television network who has a green light vote? I don’t know one, and I want somebody to prove me ill-informed.”