Halle Berry's Oscar Win Didn't Benefit Her Career Because Hollywood Sucks

Halle Berry is still the only Black woman to have won the Oscar for Best Actress. In 2002, she took home the trophy for Monster’s Ball with her historic victory. In her speech, she spoke about her win was for ‘every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.’ In a better world, it should have done exactly that. But we know it hasn’t, and the Academy’s continuing issues with inclusivity amid the entertainment world’s swing to Trump-esque ‘anti-wokeness’ is but the latest example of that. For Berry, the win didn’t even get her better roles.

Speaking to The Cut while promoting her new movie, Crime 101, she said that she hoped the win would lead to ‘a script truck showing up outside my front door.’ But that trophy, the highest honor in her field, ‘didn’t necessarily change the course of my career.’ You can certainly see that through the past 20 years of film projects, which are nowhere near the calibre one would expect for a Best Actress winner. Really, she got thrown to the wolves.

‘While I was wildly proud of it,’ Berry said of her win. ‘I was still black that next morning. Directors were still saying, ‘If we put a black woman in this role, what does this mean for the whole story? Do I have to cast a black man? Then it’s a black movie. Black movies don’t sell overseas.”

‘The morning after, I thought, ‘Wow, I was chosen to open a door.’ And then, to have no one … I question, ‘Was that an important moment, or was it just an important moment for me?” Berry said. ‘I wanted to believe it was so much bigger than me. It felt so much bigger than me, mainly because I knew others should have been there before me and they weren’t…just because I won an award doesn’t mean that, magically, the next day, there was a place for me. I was just continuing to forge a way out of no way.’

It’s so sad how right Berry is. The industry got to pat itself on the back for acknowledging Black women then went back to treating them like a niche that had no critical or commercial worth. It’s not just Berry either. Lupita Nyong’o opened up last year about how, after her Best Supporting Actress win for 12 Years a Slave, she just kept getting offered more slave roles and not much else.

There have only been 15 Black women nominated for Best Actress: Dorothy Dandridge, Diana Ross, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Bassett, Halle Berry, Gabourey Sidibe, Quvenzhané Wallis, Ruth Negga, Cynthia Erivo, and Viola Davis. And Davis is the only one to have been nominated more than once. This year, the Best Actress category is entirely white. In Best Supporting Actress, we have Wunmi Mosaku from Sinners and the current frontrunner, Teyana Taylor from One Battle After Another.