To the surprise of no one, President Donald Trump dedicated at least one of his Monday morning tweets to the 91st Academy Awards ceremony from Sunday night. The telecast managed to sneak a few political references to, or jokes at the expense of, Trump’s administration, but BlacKkKlansman director Spike Lee’s speech for winning the Best Adapted Screenplay caught his attention. Why? Because the speech urged people to “mobilize” for the 2020 election. Entertainment Weekly caught up with Lee and asked for a reaction.
As EW astutely framed it, Lee found Trump’s tweet “unsurprising”:
When EW asked the writer-director on Monday morning whether he’d seen the tweet, he nodded, then sighed. “Well, it’s okee-doke, you know,” he said with a shrug. “They change the narrative.”
“They did the same thing with the African-American players who were kneeling, trying to make it into an anti-American thing, an anti-patriotic thing, and an anti-military thing,” he explained. “But no one’s going for that.”
Of course, conservative-leaning outlets like Fox News did go for it, but that’s about as surprising as Trump’s calling Lee out over Twitter. Even so, despite this and the fact that the popular-yet-contested film Green Book took home the Best Picture trophy, Lee sounds like he’s ready to move on to the next thing. On Instagram, he announced that all things BlacKkKlansman was “over” and that we was “on to the next.”
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
