Spike Lee: Beyoncé's Grammy snub is "straight-up shenanigans, skulduggery, subterfuge"

“I’m not the male president of the Bey Hive, but I love and support Beyoncé. Her album is amazing. I know she’s won multiple Grammys, but four times nominated for album of the year and she’s lost every time? No disrespect to those artists like Adele or Harry Styles who won. It’s not their fault, but that’s some straight-up bullshit,” he said.

Lee was recently awarded the BFI Fellowship, the highest honor bestowed by the British Film Institute, for his “outstanding contribution to film or television culture” through films and series like Do The Right Thing and She’s Gotta Have It. Still, as a leader in the #OscarsSoWhite movement and longtime veteran of the industry, he is of course intimately familiar with the hurdles fellow Black artists have to jump through for a morsel of recognition. (A clip from Aubrey Plaza’s 2019 Independent Spirit Awards speech calling out the lack of acting nominations for Lee’s own BlacKkKlansman has also recently gone viral.)

“There’s a history of great black artists who come up for these awards and don’t win,” Lee said. “We all know their work is great, because art speaks for itself. But then it always comes down to this tricky territory of validation. Do black artists say: ‘Fuck it’–or seek white validation and chase awards?”

But wherever Queen Bey goes from here, Lee (and all of us) are firmly in her corner. “I just want to give a shoutout to my sister Beyoncé,” he said in conclusion. “We know what the deal is. It’s straight-up shenanigans, skulduggery, subterfuge. Or as the British say: it’s some poppycock!” Poppycock, indeed.