Oscars Rewind: For Halle Berry, a Bittersweet Breakthrough

Halle Berry had all however counted herself out.

It was a cool March evening in Hollywood in 2002, and she or he was simply excited to have been nominated for her first Academy Award, in the most effective actress class, for her function as a waitress who has an affair together with her convicted husband’s executioner in Marc Forster’s darkish drama “Monster’s Ball.”

Up in opposition to Nicole Kidman (“Moulin Rouge”), Judi Dench (“Iris”), Sissy Spacek (“Within the Bed room”) and Renée Zellweger (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”), Berry was solely the seventh African American actress ever nominated. A win would vault her into the annals of historical past as the primary Black winner.

However Berry by no means thought it might occur.

“Again in these days, for those who didn’t win the Globe, you actually didn’t get the Academy Award,” Berry, 55, mentioned in a current telephone dialog, referring to the Golden Globe that she had misplaced to Spacek. “So I’d just about resigned myself to believing, ‘It’s nice to be right here, however I’m not going to win.’”

However then the earlier 12 months’s greatest actor winner, Russell Crowe, opened the envelope and skim her title, the digicam zooming in on her teary, shocked face. She took a second to gather herself, then walked to the stage in her now-iconic Elie Saab robe, the voluminous burgundy practice trailing behind her, because the applause went on, and on, and on.

“Oh my God,” had been her first phrases when she lastly had breath sufficient to talk, tears nonetheless rolling down her cheeks, arms trembling as she clutched the statuette. She hadn’t ready a speech. She had no record of individuals to thank both.

“I don’t have any reminiscence of it,” Berry mentioned. “I don’t even understand how I obtained up there. It was completely a blackout second. All I bear in mind is Russell Crowe saying, ‘Breathe, mate.’ After which I had a golden statue in my hand, and I simply began speaking.”

She devoted the second to Dorothy Dandridge, who in 1955 grew to become the primary African American girl nominated for greatest actress (for “Carmen Jones”), and to different earlier African American nominees like Diahann Carroll and Angela Bassett.

“This second is a lot greater than me,” Berry informed the group, including, “It’s for each anonymous, faceless girl of colour that now has an opportunity as a result of this door tonight has been opened.”

At one level, she regarded as much as the balcony and noticed Sidney Poitier, who in 1964 grew to become the primary Black man to win an Academy Award for greatest actor, for “Lilies of the Subject,” and was there that evening to obtain an honorary award.

“It was so particular to have him there,” Berry mentioned in an interview, a couple of weeks after he died in January at age 94. “He and Dorothy Dandridge allowed me to dream exterior my very own yard and consider that somewhat Black child from Cleveland might do that.”

When the orchestra signaled her to wrap it up after about three minutes, she resisted.

“It’s been 74 years,” she mentioned onstage, referring to all of the ceremonies wherein a white actress had received the award. “I obtained to take this time.” (It might be a night of lengthy speeches, clocking in because the longest Oscars ever, at 4 hours and 23 minutes.)

A couple of moments later, the evening entered the historical past books once more: Denzel Washington grew to become the second African American man to win greatest actor, for his function as a crooked cop in “Coaching Day,” making the 2002 ceremony the primary — and solely — time each of the highest performing awards went to actors of colour.

However within the 20 years since that evening, simply 12 different Black performers have received Oscars. Although two males — Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker — have joined the ranks of African American greatest actor winners, no different Black girls have been named greatest actress, and it took eight years after Berry’s win for one more Black girl to even be nominated within the class (Gabourey Sidibe for “Treasured” in 2010).

“It didn’t open the door,” Berry mentioned. “The truth that there’s nobody standing subsequent to me is heartbreaking.”

Mia L. Masks, a professor of movie at Vassar Faculty and the creator of “Divas on Display screen: Black Ladies in American Movie,” mentioned Berry’s victory was notably notable as a result of it got here amid a paucity of high quality roles for Black males — and even fewer for Black girls.

“For a lady of colour to win, the movie itself needs to be a very good film and meet the sensibility of academy members,” she mentioned. “And the efficiency needs to be good.”

The roles traditionally obtainable to African American performers, she famous, have largely been remoted characters depending on white benefactors, as was the case with each of the components for which Black actors received Oscars earlier than Berry: Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy in “Gone With the Wind” and Poitier’s handyman in “Lilies of the Subject.”

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, was the goal of criticism from one other Black actress, Angela Bassett, who informed Newsweek in June 2002 that she had declined the half as a result of she “wasn’t going to be a prostitute on movie.” (Bassett didn’t reply to a request for remark for this story.)

Noting that she didn’t “begrudge Halle her success,” Bassett mentioned on the time, “I couldn’t try this as a result of it’s such a stereotype about Black girls and sexuality.” (Tom Ortenberg, president of Lionsgate Movies, which produced the film, later mentioned Bassett was by no means provided the function of Leticia, who was not a prostitute.)

Masks mentioned that right this moment’s audiences are extra attuned to the contrivances of “Monster’s Ball” than they had been 20 years in the past, notably the restaurant and jail scenes which are strikingly underpopulated, even for rural Georgia. Berry’s character has no church, faculty or civic teams obtainable for her to even contemplate becoming a member of.

“It’s not credible {that a} younger girl — notably as engaging as Berry’s Leticia — would stay in isolation with none Black neighborhood,” she mentioned.

In a 2004 article revealed in Movie Quarterly, Masks famous that the movie, which is ready in a Georgia city within the Nineties, can be problematic due to its voyeuristic perspective towards working-class girls’s sexuality within the context of American race relations.

“Many viewers interpreted the movie’s intercourse scenes as reproducing the pornographic gaze on the Black feminine physique, thereby re-stigmatizing Black female sexuality,” she wrote.

Berry mentioned that she was conscious of the criticism and that she would “completely” take the function right this moment.

“I liked that character from the minute I learn the script,” she mentioned. “I believed the story was essential, and it touched me. So if I learn that right this moment and felt that very same approach, which I believe I’d — completely.”

Berry mentioned that whereas she actually celebrated her milestone win, she was decided to not let it change the kinds of components she took.

“It’s important to keep true to no matter obtained you to that place to get that award,” she mentioned. “And, for me, it was taking dangers and doing issues exterior the field.”

However, Berry emphasised, the truth that no African American has received the academy’s high performing award for girls previously 20 years mustn’t take something away from girls like Lena Waithe and Viola Davis, who’re producing “miraculous, great work.”

“We will’t at all times choose success or progress by what number of awards we have now,” she mentioned. “Awards are the icing on the cake — they’re your friends saying you had been exceptionally wonderful this 12 months — however does that imply that if we don’t get the exceptionally wonderful nod, that we weren’t nice, and we’re not profitable, and we’re not altering the world with our artwork, and our alternatives aren’t rising?”

Much more essential than the statuette in her bed room, Berry mentioned, is the work she’s been in a position to do within the years since. She lately directed her first movie, the combined martial arts drama “Bruised,” which started streaming on Netflix in November.

“Twenty years in the past, a Black girl directing a film in regards to the struggle style?” she mentioned. “I don’t suppose I might’ve even wrapped my mind round it. That’s proof to me that issues are altering.”