By Elizabeth LeBlanc

Academy Award winner Spike Lee, known for his involvement in films dealing with controversial social, racial and political issues, gave a motivational lecture to a crowd of about 500 in Blackman Auditorium Friday night.

The Council for University Programs and Alpha Epsilon co-sponsored the night in order to bring the noted film director, writer, producer and actor to campus.

A resident of Brooklyn and an avid New York sports fan, Lee got the crowd going by reminding the audience members of the Giants’ victory over the Patriots in January’s Superbowl XLII. He also acknowledged the Red Sox weren’t so bad after they came back from a three-game deficit in the 2004 American League championships to defeat the New York Yankees. Lee held his ground though, saying “the Celtics won’t make it out of the East.”

Lee used rules in sports like football and baseball to segue into how a respectable society needs rules to get along, and that the current political arena is looking to change the rules. More specifically, he said Hillary Clinton is looking to reverse the deal given to Michigan and Florida for earlier primaries, now that she is behind in the race.

He frequently expressed his animosity toward the George W. Bush administration but gained the audience’s attention early by praising the college students’ generation as “the most colorblind generation we’ve had in this country.” This was the tone he set for the hour-long journey through what it means to make it as an African American filmmaker in the United States.

Karl Dunkley, a middler music industry major, said Lee is his favorite director and a person he idolizes.

“He’s witty, so you know, I enjoyed that,” he said. “At the end of the day, when he gave the answer it would be like something of sense, something of sustenance.”

Lee’s speech ranged from the importance of going to college to how the Academy Awards persistently jips deserving directors and actors, like Martin Scorsese for “The Godfather” and Denzel Washington for “Malcolm X,” before giving them awards years later for other projects.

He also talked about what it means for him when he is in the midst of somebody he admires. There are thousands of people who aren’t living their lives and are simply “in it, day to day to day. And so that’s why college is so important, that’s why university is so important because this is where you should be trying to expose yourself to what it is that you love,” he said.

Lee shared his own experience of going to college, starting out as an unmotivated average ‘C’ student. He followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather by attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, a historic and prestigious African American college that Martin Luther King attended at the same time as Lee’s father. It wasn’t until Lee “exhausted all of his electives” that he chose his major in the summer of 1977, finding his calling as a filmmaker.

“I did not choose filmmaking, filmmaking chose me,” he said.

This was the moment in which Lee turned himself into a serious student, declaring mass communications as his major, and started focusing on what it would take to become a filmmaker. After looking at graduate schools where he could study film, he chose New York University, where he is currently a professor for film studies.

“It was like a breath of fresh air,” said Rachel Mayo, a middler music industry major. “[He taught me] that I need to strive to be great, that success is not everything but to leave your mark in this world is.”

During the question and answer portion of the lecture, Lee was asked who was his favorite director, and what he would do if he were in the position to speak to this person. Lee said it is Scorsese, who was in Boston that day filming his latest movie, “Shutter Island,” and who had ate lunch with Lee earlier that afternoon.

Lee said that during the lunch, knowing everything that Scorsese has accomplished and what he could contribute to Lee, the best thing he could do was listen.

Lee told the crowd the best thing his parents ever taught him was “sometimes you gotta shut the F up, listen and learn because you don’t know everything.”