Everyone just chill. Ice Cube weighed in on the ongoing Oscar controversy on The Graham Norton Show on Friday, January 22, and explained that he doesn’t see what all the fuss was about.
“You can’t boycott something that you never went to anyway,” the Straight Outta Compton producer told the talk show host. “That’s kinda weird. I look at it like a horse race. Once your horse loses the race, you tear up the ticket, go home. Back on out. … We don’t do movies for the industry; we do movies for the fans, for the people. And, you now, the industry, if they give you a trophy or not, or they pat you on the back or not, it’s nice but it’s not something you should dwell on.”
The 46-year-old rapper added that his own film, which is up for best original screenplay, reached its goal simply by reaching a wide swath of viewers.
“I think an older generation got an understanding of why we do that kind of music, and the younger generation got a history lesson, and we got so much praise for the movie, it’s like, how could you be mad because one other academy or guild or anybody didn’t say it’s the No. 1?” Ice Cube added. “It’s crying about not having enough icing on your cake. It’s just ridiculous.”
Other filmmakers and celebrities have been weighing in on the #OscarsSoWhite controversy since Jada Pinkett Smith announced in a video post to Facebook Monday that she would not be attending the awards ceremony in protest.
Her husband, Will Smith, followed suit not too long afterward, and other prominent names including Spike Lee will also be absent from the awards.
Pinkett Smith’s decision and call for a boycott of the awards show has led other celebrities, such as Michael Caine and Mark Ruffalo, to weigh in on both sides of the spectrum regarding the lack of diversity in Hollywood.
“You can’t vote for an actor because he’s black. You can’t just say, ‘I’m going to vote for him. He’s not very good, but he’s black. I’ll vote for him,’” Caine said during an interview with the BBC. “You have to give a good performance.”
And the conversation prompted Avengers: Age of Ultron star Julie Delpy to comment that she sometimes wished she were African American instead of a woman “because people don’t bash them afterward.”
Check out Us Weekly’s timeline of all the biggest moments in the 2016 Oscar controversy thus far.
