Oscar winner Spike Lee has shared some thoughts about two of the highest-profile movie titles of 2023, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon.
The Do the Right Thing filmmaker listed the two films when he was asked during a Washington Post interview what recent movies are inspiring him.
“That’s my guy,” Lee said of Scorsese, calling his latest, Killers of the Flower Moon, “a great film.” A Film Academy member, Lee signgled out the performance of the movie’s breakout star, Lily Gladstone, who could become the first Native American actress to win a Lead Actress Oscar.
“Lily Gladstone, she’s winning an Oscar,” Lee said. “She’s got my vote.”
Lee also called Oppenheimer a “great film” and Nolan “a massive filmmaker,” revealing that he showed Nolan’s World War II epic Dunkirk in the class he teaches at NYU.
With the caveat that this is “a comment”, not “a criticism,” Lee said, “I would like to add some more minutes about what happened to the Japanese people. People got vaporized. Many years later, people are radioactive.
“It’s not like he didn’t have power,” Lee said of Nolan. “He tells studios what to do. I would have loved to have the end of the film maybe show what it did, dropping those two nuclear bombs on Japan.”
Oppenheimer, which has grossed about $934M worldwide, tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Shared by others too, it’s been a rare note of criticism among the overwhelming praise for the film that it does chronicle the creation of the atomic bomb but not the destruction it caused.
Lee was quick to add that “this is all love” and quipped, “I bet he could tell me some things he would change about Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X.
