Filmmaker Spike Lee to boycott Oscars over all-white nominees

African-American director Spike Lee and actress Jada Pinkett Smith said on Monday they will boycott next month’s Academy Awards ceremony because black actors had been shut out of the Oscar nominations. The acting nominees announced on Thursday lacked black performers for the second year in a row.

How is it possible for the 2nd consecutive year all 20 contenders under the actor category are white? And let’s not even get into the other branches. 40 white actors in 2 years and no flava at all. We can’t act?!

Spike Lee wrote under the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag

Lee, the director of such films as “Do the Right Thing” and 2015’s “Chi-Raq,” said he was coinciding his boycott announcement with the national holiday commemorating slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Pinkett Smith also said she would stay away from the Feb. 28 awards ceremony. Her husband, Will Smith, who stars in the football injury drama “Concussion,” and Idris Elba, who portrayed an African warlord in “Beasts of No Nation,” were among the black actors shunned this year.

Maybe it’s time we pull back our resources and we put them back into our communities, and we make programs for ourselves that acknowledge us in ways that we see fit, that are just as good as the so-called mainstream.

Jada Pinkett Smith in a video posted to Facebook

Arts Oscars