Halle Berry Says She Finds It “Heartbreaking” She’s Still The Only Black Best Actress Oscar Winner
As we are getting close to the 2022 Oscars, award-winning actress Halle Berry is looking back on her historic win.
While speaking with @nytimes, Berry recalled thinking that she wasn’t going to take home the award for best actress in 2002 but she did for her performance in “Monster’s Ball.” She explained to the Times that “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.'”
During her speech, she noted that “It’s been 74 years,” at the time, while referencing the fact that she was the first Black woman to win the award. Twenty years later, she’s still in disbelief that she is still the only Black woman to win the best actress Oscar: “The fact that there’s no one standing next to me is heartbreaking.” As CNN notes, two Black men, Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker, have won the Oscar for the best actor since then.
Now, despite the bittersweet breakthrough, Berry says although there’s a lack of Black women winners in that category, “We can’t always judge success or progress by how many awards we have,” she told the Times.
“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?”
Unfortunately, there are no Black women nominated in the best actress category this year as well. The 94th Academy Awards is set to air Sunday on ABC.
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