Popular Director, Spike Lee is the latest black celeb to announce that he will be boycotting the 2016 Academy Awards. He made this announcement the same day Americans were commemorating slain civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Lee joined actress Jada Pinkett Smith who protested that black actors were shut out of nominations. Interestingly the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) responsible for the Oscars also acknowledged it needed to do more to promote diversity.
Under the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, Lee wrote “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?!”
AMPAS President Cheryl Boone Isaacs who lamented that she was “heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion” said “the change is not coming as fast as we would like. We need to do more.”
In a video on Facebook, Pinkett Smith said “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.”
Her husband, Will Smith, who starred in the football injury drama “Concussion,” and Idris Elba, who portrayed an African warlord in “Beasts of No Nation,” were among black actors snubbed this year. The black cast of “Straight Outta Compton” were also left out.