Spike Lee is infamous for having been snubbed for Oscars five times during his career as a director. At Sunday’s awards ceremony, he won Best Adapted Screenplay for his critically praised and controversial dark comedy Blackkklansman.
Lee used his brief platform accepting his Oscar for Best Screenwriting to pontificate about contemporary politics and racial oppression.
“Before the world tonight, I give praise to our ancestors who have built this country into what it is today along with the genocide of its native people… We all connect with our ancestors. We will have love and wisdom regained, we will regain our humanity. It will be a powerful moment… Let’s all mobilize, Let’s all be on the right side of history. Make the moral choice between love versus hate. Let’s do the right thing! You know I had to get that in there.”
While he didn’t explicitly name President Donald Trump in the speech, the implicit call for Trump to lose the 2020 election is obvious. Spike Lee dedicated the ending of Blackkklansman to directly connecting the KKK, David Duke, the Charlesville riots and Donald Trump as modern proponents of white supremacy.
President Trump called out the speech early Monday morning on Twitter:
Blackkklansman remains one of the most controversial films of 2018. While it’s Spike Lee’s strongest film in years, it’s functionally a prank visited upon its viewers that suckers it’s the white audience in with the notion that the KKK hasn’t been relevant since the 1970s only to pull the rug out on you and claim that America hasn’t improved racially in decades. This message has enthralled progressive critics but conservatives have largely harbored negative feelings towards the film for its outlandish accusations and highly implicative ending.
For fans of Green Book, however, the Oscars was a good night.
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