Halle Berry had almost ignored herself.
It was a cool night in Hollywood in 2002, and she was just thrilled to be nominated for her first Academy Award, in the Best Actress category, for her role as a waitress having an affair with her convicted husband’s executioner in Marc Forster’s executioner. dark drama “Monster’s Ball.”
Against Nicole Kidman (“Moulin Rouge”), Judi Dench (“Iris”), Sissy Spacek (“In the Bedroom”) and Renée Zellweger (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”), Berry was only the seventh African-American actress ever nominated. A win would put her in the annals of history as the first black winner.
But Berry never thought it would happen.
“Back in the day, if you didn’t win the Globe, you really didn’t get an Academy Award,” Berry, 55, said in a recent phone call, referring to the Golden Globe she lost to Spacek. “So I kind of resigned myself to believing, ‘It’s great to be here, but I’m not going to win.'”
But when the previous year’s Best Actor winner, Russell Crowe, opened the envelope and read her name, the camera zoomed in on her tearful, shocked face. She took a moment to recover, then walked to the podium in her now iconic Elie Saab dress, the voluminous burgundy train chasing her, as the applause went on, and on, and on.
“Oh my god,” were her first words when she finally had enough breath to speak, tears still rolling down her cheeks, her hands trembling as she held the statue. She had not prepared a speech. She also didn’t have a list of people to thank.
“I don’t remember it at all,” Berry said. ‘I don’t even know how I got there. It was really 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.”
She devoted the moment to Dorothy Dandridge, who in 1955 became the first African-American woman to be nominated for Best Actress (for “Carmen Jones”), and to other previous African-American nominees such as Diahann Carroll and Angela Bassett.
“This moment is so much bigger than me,” Berry told the crowd, adding, “It’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door has been opened tonight.”
At one point, she looked up at the balcony and saw Sidney Poitier, who in 1964 became the first black man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” and was there that night to claim an honorary award. to receive.
Discover the Academy Awards of 2022
The 94th Academy Awards will be held in Los Angeles on March 27.
“It was so special to have him there,” Berry said in an interview, a few weeks after he died in January at age 94. “He and Dorothy Dandridge made me dream outside my own backyard and believe that a little black kid from Cleveland could do this.”
When the orchestra signaled her to finish after about three minutes, she resisted.
“It’s been 74 years,” she said onstage, referring to all the ceremonies in which a white actress had won the award. “I have to take this time.” (It would be a night of long speeches, clocking in at four hours and 23 minutes as the longest Oscars ever.)
Moments later, the night went down in the history books again: Denzel Washington became the second African-American man to win the Best Actor award for his role as a dirty cop in “Training Day,” making the 2002 ceremony the first — and only-time was both of the best acting awards went to colored actors.
But in the 20 years since that night, only 12 other black performers have won Oscars. Although two men — Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker — have joined the African American Best Actor winners, no other black women have been named Best Actress, and it took eight years after Berry’s win for another black woman to even win. was nominated in the category (Gabourey Sidibe for “Precious” in 2010).
“It didn’t open the door,” Berry said. “The fact that there is no one standing next to me is heartbreaking.”
Mia L. Mask, a film professor at Vassar College and author of “Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film,” said Berry’s win was especially notable because it came amid a lack of quality roles for black men — and even less so. for black women.
“For a woman of color to win, the movie itself has to be a good movie and meet the sensitivity of academy members,” she said. †And the performance must be good.”
The roles available to African American performers in the past, she noted, have been largely isolated characters who relied on white benefactors, as was the case with both parts for which black actors won Oscars for Berry: Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy in “Gone.” With the Wind” and Poitier’s handyman in “Lilies of the Field.”
The carnal nature of the central “Monster’s Ball” relationship between Berry’s character, Leticia, and Billy Bob Thornton’s character, Hank, a white corrections officer, has been the target of criticism from another black actress, Angela Bassett, who told Newsweek in June 2002 said she had turned down the role because she ‘wouldn’t be a prostitute on film’. (Bassett did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
Noting that she “didn’t begrudge Halle her success,” Bassett said at the time, “I couldn’t do that because it’s such a stereotype about black women and sexuality.” (Tom Ortenberg, president of Lionsgate Films, which produced the film, later said that Bassett was never offered the role of Leticia, who was not a prostitute.)
Mask said today’s audiences are more attuned to the ingenuity of “Monster’s Ball” than they were 20 years ago, especially the restaurant and prison scenes that are remarkably underpopulated, even for rural Georgia. Berry’s character has no church, school, or community groups that she can even consider joining.
Our reviews of the 10 Oscar nominees for the best picture
“It’s not credible that a young woman – especially as attractive as Berry’s Leticia – would live in isolation without any black community,” she said.
In a 2004 article published in Film Quarterly, Mask noted that the film, set in a Georgia town in the 1990s, is also problematic because of its voyeuristic attitude to the sexuality of working-class women in the context of American society. race relations.
“Many viewers interpreted the film’s sex scenes as a reproduction of the pornographic view of the black female body, thereby re-stigmatizing black female sexuality,” she wrote.
Berry said she was aware of the criticism and that she would “absolutely” take on the role today.
“I loved that character from the moment I read the script,” she said. “I thought the story was important and it touched me. So if I read that today and feel the same way, which I think I would – absolutely.
Berry said that while she certainly celebrated her milestone win, she was determined not to let the kind of parts she took change change.
“You have to stay true to everything that brought you to that place to get that award,” she said. “And for me it was taking risks and doing things off the beaten track.”
But, Berry stressed, the fact that no African-American has won the academy’s best female acting award in the past two decades should not detract from women like Lena Waithe and Viola Davis, who produce “wonderful, beautiful work.”
“We can’t always judge success or progress by how many awards we have,” she said. “Awards are the icing on the cake — it’s your peers who say you were exceptionally outstanding this year — but means if we don’t get the exceptionally outstanding nod, we weren’t great, and we’re not successful, and we’re changing the world with our art, and our opportunities do not grow?”
Even more important than the statuette in her bedroom, Berry said, is the work she’s been able to do in the years since. She recently directed her first film, the mixed martial arts drama “Bruised,” which began streaming on Netflix in November.
“Twenty years ago a black woman directed a movie about the fighting genre?” she said. “I don’t think I could have even wrapped my brain around it. That to me is proof that things are changing.”