Martin Luther King Jr. Day turned out to be quite eventful for Hollywood. Jada Pinkett Smith announced via video that she would be boycotting this year’s Academy Awards because of the exclusion of black performances in the four major acting categories. This is the second year in a row that black actors have been shut out.
Spike Lee, who received an honorary Oscar at last year’s Governors Awards, also announced on Facebook that he and his wife, Tonya Lewis Lee, would be skipping the festivities, too.
To me it seemed like an appropriate response to the general outrage about blacks being excluded—again—as documented in the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag that populated Twitter the day the nominees were announced.
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