Halle Berry Said It’s ‘Heartbreaking’ She’s The Only Black Woman To Win Best Actress Academy Award
Halle Berry made history in 2002 by winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in “Monster’s Ball.” The 55-year-old actress spoke with The New York Times recently on why she never expected to win.
Berry said, “Back in those days, if you didn’t win the Globe, you really didn’t get the Academy Award. So I’d pretty much resigned myself to believing, ‘It’s great to be here, but I’m not going to win.’”
Sissy Spacek received a Golden Globe for her performance in “In The Bedroom” that year. Berry still went on to win the Oscar though. She noted during her acceptance speech, “It’s been 74 years,” suggesting that she was the first black woman to win the prize since the Oscars began.
The “Moonfall” star isn’t happy with the fact that she’s still the only black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress two decades later.
The actress said, “It didn’t open the door. The fact that there’s no one standing next to me is heartbreaking.”
Berry acknowledged that awards aren’t the most important thing in the world, but they are great to get. She hopes that more black women had won after she did in 2002.
“We can’t always judge success or progress by how many awards we have,” Berry added.
She told the NYT, “Awards are the icing on the cake — they’re your peers saying you were exceptionally excellent this year. But does that mean that if we don’t get the exceptionally excellent nod, that we were not great, and we’re not successful, and we’re not changing the world with our art, and our opportunities aren’t growing?”
Two black women were nominated for Academy Awards last year for their performances, but neither won the grand prize. In “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Viola Davis was nominated for Best Actress, and Andra Day was nominated for “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.”
Critics are outraged that no black women are nominated for Best Actress in the 2022 event. The Academy Awards are scheduled for March 27th.
During her 2002 Oscars speech, Berry said, “This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It’s for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”
She added to the NYT, “I don’t have any memory of it. I don’t even know how I got up there. It was totally a blackout moment. All I remember is Russell Crowe saying, ‘Breathe, mate.’ And then I had a golden statue in my hand, and I just started talking.”
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