The BlacKkKlansman director missed out on the best picture Oscar, but with US politics more divided than ever he remains the fearless voice the industry needs
‘What’s Spike Lee going to have to say about this?” That was the first question on many minds after the initial shock of Green Book winning the best picture Oscar. We were just waiting for a reaction shot of Lee, applauding resignedly at history repeating itself. It was nearly 30 years ago that Lee was in a similar situation, when the anodyne, feelgood civil rights film Driving Miss Daisy won best picture, while Lee’s exhilarating Do the Right Thing went home empty-handed. Green Book was this year’s Driving Miss Daisy. While Lee’s considerably more confrontational BlacKkKlansman – also nominated for best picture – didn’t go home empty-handed, it must have felt like insult added to injury. According to the reporter Andrew Dalton, Lee was “visibly angry” at the announcement, “waving his arms in disgust and appearing to try to storm out of the Dolby theatre before he was stopped at the doors”.
Ironically, at first glance, Green Book and BlacKkKlansman have much in common. Both are set in the recent past and tackle US racism via a reluctant friendship between a black man and a white man. But where Green Book falls firmly into the category you could call “Isn’t it great how we’re not as racist as we used to be” movies, BlacKkKlansman concludes the opposite. Its sting-in-the-tail coda – footage from the 2017 white-nationalist march in Charlottesville, North Carolina, cheered on by the Ku Klux Klan – is a reminder that the US is every bit as racist as it used to be. Green Book finished with a wishful, small-scale racial truce; BlacKkKlansman delivered a harder, less convenient truth.
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