In an interview in today’s Chicago Tribune in advance of the Artistic Achievement Award he will receive this weekend at the Chicago International Film Festival’s Black Perspectives Tribute, Anthony Mackie states that black film today needs a “catalyst” and that filmmakers such as Spike Lee and Robert Townsend should be insprations to new black filmmakers today.

He also says in the interview that: “We’re at a place where we need the next Robert Townsend. We need the next young filmmakers like Spike Lee or John Singleton to come along and show our world in a different light.It happened in music. It was all gang-banging and ‘hoes’ until Talib Kweli, Common and Kanye West came out and redefined the era of the conscious millennium rapper. I feel in film it has to be the same thing.”

O.K. granted. It’s not exactly anything that hasn’t been said before but I just wanted to make sure that at least it was posted here on S & A for the record. To use The New York Times’ motto after a fashion: All the black cinema news that fit to print