I’ve only interviewed one Oscar winner, a Black woman named Jennifer Hudson. Hudson, who is also a multiple Grammy winner, won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 2007 for her film debut in Dreamgirls. But 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 with Hattie McDaniel winning Best Supporting Actress for playing “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind. She couldn’t attend the premiere of the film in Atlanta because the theatre 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 four Black men have won Best Actor, beginning with Sidney Poitier in 1964. Since the award’s inception, only 19 times has a Black person won an Oscar for their acting. Often the awards were for roles that reinforce 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 3,000 Oscars awarded since 1929, barely 50 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.”
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In that vein, as a person of Asian descent, I was ecstatic over Michelle Yeoh's win this year (along with Ke Huy Quan and Daniel Kwan for more Asian faces in other categories). I felt that on the strength of the acting, if it was down to the two EEAAO nominees, Stephanie Hsu should've gotten it over JLC (not JUST because she's Asian, but the character of Joy/Jobu Tupaki was so much deeper and more complex than Dierdre).
But it's still a long road ahead for Asian actors to show that we're not all just sidekicks, nerds, background set-dressing, and mystical warriors. I'm not holding my breath in the hope that in 20 years, we'll be celebrating more East Asian, Indian, Black, Indigenous, or Hispanic/Latin award winners.
In addition to the Oscars being a virtual desert for minorities, my main objection is that this event has become little more than an orgy of self-congratulatory ass kissing by the privileged Hollywood elite. Yes, there are some independent film makers who deserve the recognition they receive, but the true nature of the event was perfectly encapsulated in a repugnant face slap by Will Smith on Chris Rock. Rich, entitled celebrities behaving badly. ✌️