In 2002, Halle Berry received the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Marc Forster's In the Shadow of Hate. Since then, the statuette has provoked guilt in the actress, but also, more recently, anger at a flagrant lack of diversity among the award recipients.
Halle Berry gets angry about the lack of black women at the Oscars
22 years ago, in March 2002, the talented Halle Berry became the first black actress to win the Oscar for best actress. A reward awarded for her role in In the Shadow of Hate, a romantic drama forbidden to young people about the prison environment in the United States. At 36, the young actress was nominated in a category where only five other African-Americans had been nominated before her (Angela Bassett, Whoopi Goldberg, Diahann Carroll, Cicely Tyson and Dorothy Dandridge). And since then, nothing… In an interview with Marie Claire,Halle Berry was outraged to be the first and only black actress to win the Oscar for Best Actress:
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I am constantly angry that no black woman has come after me for the Oscar for Best Actress, and it continually saddens me, year after year. And it's not like none of them have earned it. […]”
She's not black, but Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh, by receiving the Oscar for best actress in 2023 for her role in the crazy Everything Everywhere All at Once has still contributed to diversifying the profile of the award recipients. In any case, Halle Berry's rant, although it takes the example of African-American women, essentially concerns all underrepresented minorities within the Academy. The audiovisual landscape has certainly changed in recent years, becoming more inclusive, but it is criticized for transforming white/heterosexual/male characters into black/LGBTQ/female, rather than creating new ones… A lazy laxity that does not help in writing Oscar-worthy roles for minorities.
And in a completely different area, discover here the only condition for Halle Berry's return as Catwoman.