Diversity or go bust, warns Spike Lee

SPIKE Lee said that diversity in movie making and at the Oscars was not only more fair but also crucial for business as US audiences grow less white.

Asked at the Berlin film festival about his decision not to attend this month’s Academy Awards due to the all-white acting nominees two years running, the AfricanAmerican filmmaker said the issue went deeper than prizes.

“The Academy Awards is really not the problem. The problem is with the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers, these are the people at the executive levels, at the studios, and the networks and cable TV. They sit in a room every quarter and decide what we’re going to make and what we’re not going to make,” he said.

Lee, 58, said most of those decision makers were “white men”.

“So if there’s no diversity there, that’s reflected in the movies that get made, the movies that get voted on (for the Oscar nominations),” he said.

Lee said if studios failed to take the interests of a broader audience into account, “they’re going to go out of business because there’s a large market there,” citing the recent box-office success of Straight Outta Compton, a biopic about the rap group N.W.A. as an example.

The Brooklyn-born Lee, who won a lifetime achievement Oscar last year, wrote an open letter to the Academy decrying the “lily white” nominations.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences later announced “historic action” to double the number of women and minority members by 2020 and launch a global effort to “recruit qualified new members who represent greater diversity”.

“If a ruckus had not been raised, I believe that the Academy would not have made those changes,” Lee said. — AFP