Spike Lee honours his grandmothers in unforgettable Oscar speech — watch
While accepting his first-ever Oscar for BlacKkKlansman, Lee remembered his grandmothers who supported him
For decades, Spike Lee has been making some of the most challenging and groundbreaking films — among them 1986's She's Gotta Have It, 1989's Do the Right Thing, 1992's Malcolm X, 2000's The Original Kings of Comedy, 2006's Inside Man and 2015's Chi-Raq, to name a few.
He's been nominated for Oscars five times, but this year, the legendary director finally got to take home some hardware, winning best adapted screenplay for BlacKkKlansman.
Related: 'The ref made a bad call': Spike Lee reacts to Green Book win
In his powerful acceptance speech, Lee talked about 400 years of slavery, and honoured his grandmothers, one of whom graduated from college even though her mother was a slave; he also recounted how a grandmother saved 50 years of social security cheques to put her first grandchild — whom she called "Spikey-Poo" — through college and NYU graduate school for film.
It's an incredible speech; watch it in full here: