Spike Lee and actress Jada Pinkett Smith will boycott next month's Academy Awards ceremony because black actors had been shut out of the Oscar nominations.
The Oscar acting nominees announced on Thursday lacked black performers for the second year in a row. The lack of African American nominees led to the revival of the Twitter feed #OscarsSoWhite, which had emerged in 2015.
Lee said he was coinciding his boycott announcement with the national holiday commemorating slain civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Lee wrote under the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag,
"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."
Pinkett Smith, who appeared in two "Matrix" movies, also said she would stay away from the Feb. 28 awards ceremony.
She said in a video posted to Facebook,
"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."
18-01-2016 - Vidéo Spike Lee / Pink /
