Spike Lee still hasn't won an Oscar, though he is still at the height of his career and is likely to win one in the future. However, he has been nominated twice.

His first nomination was for Do the Right Thing in 1989. This powerful film, in which he also starred, was about race tensions in New York, exploring the prejudices existing among different racial groups, which gradually spill over into violence during one hot summer. When it failed to win an Academy Award, Lee remarked that he wasn't worried about that, but it did bother him that the winner that year, Driving Miss Daisy, which was also about race relations, was such a tame and cosy film by comparison.

His second nomination was a 1997 documentary, 4 Little Girls. This was about the shooting of schoolchildren during the Alabama anti-segregation protests in 1963. Again, some felt that the film should have won but that Hollywood went with a 'safer' choice (in this case The Long Way Home by Mark Jonathan Harris.