Director Spike Lee is taking a page out of comedian Bill Cosby’s playbook.

The man who gave us “Do the Right Thing” and “He Got Game” is talking up the power of getting a good education and how the media makes gangster life far too appealing. Cosby said essentially the same thing a few years back, but members of the black community didn’t take kindly to the veteran comic’s message.

Despite 100 years of slavery, our ancestors were smart enough to know that education would be the thing to lead us out of bondage,” he said. “At a time when to learn to read and write was against the law for African-Americans, our ancestors risked life and limb to learn.”

He spoke of his parents’ and grandparents’ generations greatest mantra: “Education is the key.”

Then, he asked the crowd how, with such a rich history, fewer than half of Black males graduate from high school in America.

Lee blamed the influence that crack cocaine has had in poor neighborhoods and the influence that media have had in glorifying drugs and gangsters, whom he said are primarily portrayed by Black actors.

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1989 remains a notable year for movies, one in which we learned that you couldn’t cure Mel Gibson’s case of the crazies, and that Kim Basinger weighed a little more than 108 pounds. The world was introduced to at least two filmmakers who would become unlikely mainstream mainstays: a jolly fat man whose wildly imaginative comedic fantasies would redefine a genre, and a sensitive geek who went and made a damn movie about a guy who videotapes women talking about sex.  Finally, it was the year that our angriest black filmmaker achieved mainstream success with a slice of life drama whose climax would have everyone talking and Roger Ebert crying.

None of these movies sniffed the Oscar. The nominees for Best Picture, please…

“Driving Miss Daisy”: Morgan Freeman’s performance approaches greatness, and I’d love to go to bat for a movie filmed and set in Atlanta, but like “Batman,” the movie may have won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1989 but it feels like a relic.

“Dead Poets Society”: Some really great performances, but the ending seems more manipulative the older I get.

“Born on the Fourth of July”: Stunning, great film.  Nolte nails it here.

“My Left Foot”: I know that I really loved this movie when it came out, especially Daniel Day Lewis’ Oscar-winning performance, but I have never felt the desire or need to see it again since.

“Field of Dreams”: A tricky one. The premise is goofy, the movie is corny, but…(continued below)

What Should’ve Been Nominated

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Director Spike Lee’s third film, “Do the Right Thing,” hasn’t aged a day since its 1989 release. The film’s misguided views on violence were wrong-headed the second it hit theaters. And the election of President Barack Obama surely puts some of the film’s victimization subtext in fresh perspective. But as sheer entertainment, “Thing” remains a blistering experience, the culmination of every one of Lee’s unique gifts as a filmmaker.

The film’s re-release on DVD June 30 reminds us Lee hasn’t come anywhere close to matching “Thing’s” raw power in the intervening years.

“Thing” stars Lee as Mookie, a disinterested pizza delivery man working on the hottest day of the summer in the Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn. Pizza shop owner Sal (Danny Aiello) is thoroughly old school, and his bickering sons (John Turturro and Richard Edson) are hardly paragons of virtue. But Sal doesn’t have hate in his heart for his customers, who are almost all black. His food has fed them for years, he says with pride. (more…)