Halle Berry Wins an Oscar

On This Day in History: March 24

When it comes to Best Actress, only one Black woman has ever claimed it: Halle Berry for the 2001 film Monster’s Ball. The Oscars are like the sun: blindingly white.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: March 24, 2002--

The first Oscar ever won by a Black person, and the first Black person to even be nominated, came in 1940 when Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress for playing “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind. She couldn’t attend the premiere of the film in Atlanta because the theater was for whites only. When it came to the Oscars ceremony, the whites-only Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles said okay I guess we can let her in, but she needs to sit at a segregated table off to the side of the room.

A total of five Black men have won Best Actor, beginning with Sidney Poitier in 1964. Since the award’s inception, only twenty-two times has a Black person won an Oscar for their acting. Often the award was for a role that reinforced stereotypes about Black people, like being a maid or a football player. Denzel was passed over for Malcolm X, but won for being a corrupt cop. Whoopi didn’t win for The Color Purple, but did for playing a con artist in Ghost. Other Oscar categories are woefully underrepresented as well. With over three thousand Oscars awarded since 1929, barely over sixty have gone to Black people. Also of note: There have been six nominations of Black people for Best Director, but no wins.

In Monster’s Ball, Halle Berry starred as the wife of a man executed for murder. It was a controversial role, with Berry playing a tragic and complicated woman who has sex with the racist prison guard who oversaw the execution of her husband, although at the time her character did not know he had been a corrections officer. The sex scene is graphic.

When she won the Best Actress Oscar on March 24, 2002, Berry was congratulated by the NAACP, but Ebony magazine reported that many in the Black community were critical of the role she played, especially the sex scene. Fifteen years later Halle Berry said in an interview regarding her Oscar win, “That moment really meant nothing.” She repeated, “I thought it meant something, but I think it meant nothing.”

Berry was reacting to how her win failed to open doors for Black people in film, and how many years later she remains the only Black woman with a Best Actress win. Halle was also showing support for a movement begun by Black activist April Reign on Twitter two years earlier.

The tweet, posted on January 15, 2015, read: “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair.”

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.