![]() ![]() And I knew that story about working your way up from the middle doesn’t work for black people. I didn’t get smarter, I was just interested. ![]() From there, my junior and senior year, I was an A+ student. A teacher there … encouraged me to make a documentary out of all this footage. So I had all this footage and I go back to school. If the Summer of Sam had to come Harlem or Bed-Stuy, they would have killed him! It was also the summer where a guy named David Berkowitz … it was the Summer of Sam. That summer was also the summer of disco … I filmed that. My Brooklyn brothers and sisters, my fellow Puerto Rican brothers and sisters, started to loot. My friend and I drove around in a yellow station wagon. A couple days later, there was a blackout. I’m going to be a doctor, so you can have it.” So now I had something to do for the summer! I’m going to be a doctor so you can have it.” I asked “What’s in the other box?” She says, “That’s film for the Super 8 camera. I asked her, “What’s in the box?” She says “A Super 8 camera. Let me see what’s she doing, I got to her house, I’m sitting in the living room, and in the corner is a box. I was on my stoop - we call them stoops, not porches, in Brooklyn - and thought, let me go see my friend, who was very smart. I made a film about that summer, The Summer of Sam. I thought up to that point, I could always get a job in New York. I came back to New York the summer of 1977. I wasn’t motivated.Īt the end of my sophomore year, it was time to back to New York City, I had to choose a major because I’d exhausted all my electives. My first two years I was lost in the wilderness. They were two historic black schools across the street from each other in ATL. And my mother and grandmother went to Spellman College. He was a freshman when Martin Luther King was a senior. I was third generation my grandfather and father went there, too. Then I went away to college, Morehouse College. She introduced me to Scorsese when she took to me to see Mean Streets. So I was my mother’s date, drag me to movies. My father, a great jazz musician, hated movies. How did I get here? I was born in Atlanta and moved to Brooklyn and my late mother, who died when I was in film school - she was the one who intro me to film. I’m going take my time, as they say in church, take your time. You see my work, before and after, you can tell when I got married. When you look at my work … I call it “BT” and “AT”: Before Tonya and After Tonya. So I want to thank Cheryl Boone Isaacs for trying to bring some flavor up here. Wesley Snipes … shit! You know, you guys, when you chose that song, “Change is Going to Come” … it’s been a long time coming. (Below that is a video of the speech.) It’s a topic from which Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs didn’t shy away during her welcome speech, in which she announced a new initiative called A2020, which will seek to promote a greater diversity in terms of age, gender, race, national origin and point-of-view among filmmakers over the next five years. Jackson, and Wesley Snipes introduced their friend and collaborator, Lee, on the occasion of what many consider his long-overdue Academy trophy.īelow is an edited but mostly complete transcript of Lee’s speech, during which he both celebrated and criticized Hollywood for how the business, and its inclusion of diverse artists, has changed since his 1986 breakout film She’s Gotta Have It. But the highlight of the evening came when Denzel Washington, Samuel L. The glitzy event - an annual kiss-the-ring campaign stop for Oscar-hopefuls - drew hoards of A-listers including Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Steve Carell, Rachel Weisz, Jane Fonda, Michael Caine, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, and Mark Ruffalo. Reynolds, who was too ill attend the ceremony, was celebrated for decades of performances in such iconic films as Singing in the Rain (1952) and her Oscar-nominated turn in 1964’s The Unsinkable Molly Brown. ![]() Rowlands, who with her late husband John Cassavetes is widely credited with creating the model for American indie cinema, is a two-time Best Actress nominee for her and Cassevetes’s monumental film A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and again for her turn in his film Gloria (1980). Lee has never won an Oscar despite previous nominations for Best Original Screenplay for Do the Right Thing (1990) and Best Documentary Feature for 4 Little Girls (1998). At the Academy’s annual Governors Awards in Hollywood on Saturday night, filmmaker Spike Lee, actress and philanthropist Debbie Reynolds, and actress Gena Rowlands all received Honorary Oscars for their contributions to cinema. ![]()
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