Oscar Winner Calls Out Academy Awards Racism
When Halle Berry won an Academy Award, she made history as the first Black performer to win the Oscar for best actress. She took home the award for her amazing performance in Monster’s Ball way back in 2002, but she still has a major beef against the Academy that has only grown over time.
In a recent interview with Marie Claire, Halle Berry said, “I’m still eternally miffed that no Black woman has come behind me for that Best Actress Oscar, I’m continually saddened by that year after year.”
Halle Berry Calls Out Academy
It’s easy enough to look back at the history of these awards and realize that Halle Berry is right on the money when it comes to the Best Actress Oscar.
The only other person of color who has snagged that award is Michelle Yeoh for her jaw-dropping performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once. But 22 years after Berry took home her own golden statue, no other Black woman has snagged this award.
Halle Berry Having None Of It
While the Academy has been accused of racism before, the traditional counterargument to these claims is that everyone votes based on the quality of someone’s performance rather than the color of their skin.
However, Halle Berry is having none of it, and she pointed out that some excellent Black women have been nominated for this prestigious Oscar, including Andra Day in The United States vs. Billie Holiday and Viola Davis in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
In a previous interview with Variety, she mentioned the performances of Cynthia Erivo in Harriet and Ruth Negga in Loving as being worthy of an Academy Award.
Biggest Heartbreaks
As for Halle Berry, the lack of any other Black female performers winning the Best Actress Oscar has transformed one of her biggest moments of triumph into a source of profound regret.
She now calls her win “one of my biggest heartbreaks” because she originally thought she was “chosen to open a door” that other Black women would soon be walking through. This has caused her to reevaluate her own triumph and ask herself a very introspective question: “Was that an important moment, or was it just an important moment for me?”
Still Struggled In Hollywood?
Compounding this issue is that even after Halle Berry won her Oscar, she still felt like she had to struggle to establish herself in Hollywood. As she put it, “just because I won an award doesn’t mean that, magically, the next day, there was a place for me.”
Everything still felt like an uphill battle because she “was just continuing to forge a way out of no way.”
For Halle Berry, all of these ominous Oscar thoughts came to a head during the #OscarsSoWhite movement that sought to call out the Academy for consistently overlooking excellent Black performances.
Shortly after that movement sprang to life, the actor spoke about the matter at the Cannes Film Festival, describing her own victory very bluntly: “I thought it meant something, but I think it meant nothing.”
Time Will Tell
Only time will tell if the courageous commentary from Halle Berry and other actors will have a positive influence on the Academy and lead to more Black women earning their own Oscars.
If nothing else, all of this commentary and the general online backlash against the seeming focus on mainly white performers highlights the growing disparity between the tastes of Academy voters and the tastes of the general public.
Should that disparity grow large enough, it may render the Catwoman actor’s concerns largely moot because the prestige and prominence of an Academy Award will be long gone in the eyes of the average movie lover.
Source: Variety
