UB Spotlight: Watch Spike Lee + Ryan Coogler be Honored by CCA
Watch Their Acceptance Speeches.
Critics Choice Association (CCA) presented the 8th annual Celebration of Black Cinema & Television last night Tuesday, December 9th, at the Fairmont Century Plaza.
The Celebration honors standout work both onscreen and offscreen from the Black entertainment community.
Hosted by Jay Pharoah, with a performance by Aiyana-Lee.
Presenters were,Chris Perfetti, Dan Fogelman, Delroy Lindo, Godfrey, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Destiny, Samuel L. Jackson, Shamier Anderson, Wunmi Moskau; Special Guests Ludwig Göransson, Michael De Luca, Pamela Abdy, William Stanford Davis, Zinzi Coogler, and more.
Sponsors included #TakeTheLead, Milagro Tequila, Fairmont Century Plaza, IMDbPro, STARZ and Conduiit. Partners include NEP Sweetwater and FIJI Water.
Spike Lee received the Career Achievement Award, while Ryan Coogler received the Director Award.
Spike Lee stated “My grandmother taught art in the state of Georgia… and never had one white student – not one, because of the laws of segregation in the state. And my grandmother saved her Social Security check for 50 years, stacking her checks for her grandchildren’s education… She helped me go through Morehouse with those checks, helped me go to NYU, and then gave me the seed money for She’s Got To Have It… I’m a tenured professor of film…I tell my students that they gotta put the work in… I also learned that if you’re a teacher or professor, and you don’t learn from your students, then you’re not teaching: it has to go both ways… When you wake up, and not the alarm clock, and you love what you’re doing, you’re blessed, because the majority of people on this earth go to their grave having gone to a job they hated. So as artists, that’s a gift.”
Ryan Coogler shared the following; “I didn’t get a chance to tell John [Singleton] just how much he meant to me. I want to thank the Critics Choice Association for this celebration, because this gives me the opportunity to publicly thank this man for changing my life before he knew me, for being so generous with his time, being a teacher, for being an activist, and for having a bravery to fight these fights for us, so I could come behind him and stand on his shoulders…”
“Spike, thank you for fighting all the fights bro, for flying so that we could soar, thank you for putting yourself out there. Thank you for always being you. It means the world to me. It means the world to all of us, and I’m honored to call myself a filmmaker and travel in your shadows, chase you through the streets of New York and chase you on a silver screen. I love you, bro. We love you.”
Check Out The UB Spotlight: Spike Lee + Ryan Coogler Honored by CCA!
Spike Lee + Ryan Coogler Honored at ‘Celebration of Black Cinema & Television’
