Best Actress: Did Halle Berry’s Win Mean Nothing?

Halle Berry said in an interview that she believed her Oscar win would change things. She also asserted that it “meant nothing,” to be the first and only black woman to ever win in the Best Actress category.

Those of us covering the race remember that year well. It was 2001, and the pundits had Russell Crowe for A Beautiful Mind and Sissy Spacek for In the Bedroom earmarked for their wins. Challenging them were Denzel Washington for Training Day and Halle Berry for Monster’s Ball. If you just look at these four roles juxtaposed it will tell you much about what Hollywood thought of black actors back then. Crowe was playing a mathematician grappling with mental illness and Spacek was playing a mother whose son may have committed murder (It’s been a while since I’ve seen In the Bedroom but I think that’s right). Washington, by contrast, was playing a corrupt narcotics cop – a “thug.” And Berry plays a wife of a convicted murderer who begins an affair with his executioner.

Both Washington and Berry are brilliant in their roles, needless to say. Washington is probably the greatest living actor in Hollywood right now (and should have won last year for Fences), and Berry was and is far more talented than the roles she was given and broke through with Monster’s Ball. Still, both were considered long shots back in 2001.

And then the BAFTAs happened. Russell Crowe lost his temper backstage and threatened someone. The news got out that it would likely impact his awards chances. He’d previously won for Gladiator the year before, so him winning again would be one of those Tom Hanks kind-of things, rare but sometimes it happens.

For my part, I had been covering the Oscars since 1999. I had never really looked at them in terms of inclusion or diversity, but it was hard not to when Berry was up for the awards. Why? Because it all of the years of Oscar history, no black woman had won lead actress. Zero. It had been around 70 years by then. Having an independent site allowed me to cover to race however I saw fit (it still does) and that was what I chose to talk about. I noticed others were noticing too – this odd pattern throughout history.

Most of us thought it would either be Halle Berry or Denzel Washington. It could not both, we concluded. No way would the Academy award two black actors in one night. It’s funny to think of that now because it’s happened multiple times since, like last year when Viola Davis and Mahershala Ali both won, or in 2004 with Jamie Foxx and Morgan Freeman. But it seemed unheard of in 2001. Still, a few of us, like Roger Ebert (who really pioneered inclusion in the awards race much earlier than I did) predicted both Berry and Washington to win. My reasoning was it’s gonna be one or the other and I don’t know which. When both won that night, the Academy was, as they always are, ridiculed for overcompensating for criticism.

There has always been this road block, I think, to breaking up the white dominance in Hollywood and that’s the old “just because.” As in, “she shouldn’t win ‘just because’ she’s black.” But the truth is that plenty of people win ‘just because.’ It’s just a different ‘just because.’ It’s ‘just because’ she’s the most beautiful girl in town. Or ‘just because’ she’s never won an Oscar before. The color of a contender’s skin is somehow deemed irrelevant by an industry that pointedly focused mostly on white performers and white filmmakers for nearly all their history.

But it did feel, that night, as though Halle Berry had broken some new ground. What she’s discovered since is that the win was really more a win for the voters and less a win for actresses of color. How do we know this? It’s the one category that remains 99% white dominated.

Best Actor: four wins by black actors – Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker

Best Supporting Actor: five wins by black actors – Louis Gossett Jr., Denzel Washington, Cuba Gooding Jr., Morgan Freeman, Mahershala Ali

Best Supporting Actress: seven wins by black actors – Hattie McDaniel, Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Hudson, Mo’Nique, Octavia Spencer, Lupita Nyong’o, Viola Davis (four consecutive wins)

Best Actress: one win by a black actress – Halle Berry

In terms of Asian wins, Ben Kingsley for Gandhi is the lone win in either lead category. In Supporting Actor, Haing S. Ngor and Miyoshi Umeki in Supporting Actress. So the numbers here are clearly worse.

Hispanic actors fare slightly better – Benicio Del Toro, Rita Moreno, and Mercedes Ruehl in supporting. No leads.

I’ve thought a lot over the years about why Halle Berry’s was such a rare win. It always comes back to the same thing: that the films Oscar voters tend to like are the dramas that center on a white male protagonist. This isn’t exclusively true, as their tastes have been known to be broader, but for the most part everyone likes stories they themselves can relate to and most of the time movies where men are at the center, men can relate to, right? That makes sense. But add to that how difficult it’s become for any film with a female at its center to even be nominated for Best Picture, and how in the Best Actress race the nominees and winners almost always come from movies that were not nominated for Best Picture.

La La Land was an exception last year, as Emma Stone looked to be the first Best Actress winner to win in a Best Picture winner since Million Dollar Baby in 2004. But La La Land did not win Best Picture in the most shocking thing that has ever happened at the Oscars.

You can imagine since it’s difficult to get movies made with women at the center at all, it’s that much harder to get movies made with women of color at the center. Although it feels like things are changing — one has to give credit to both Oprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay, both who’ve dedicated their careers to boosting projects with women of color at the center. Have you seen Queen Sugar yet? There does still seem to be a major problem when it comes to awards.

So why is that? Well, awards are about power in Hollywood. They’re about who gets to call the shots. And believe me, women don’t. Not white women, not any women. It seems doubly hard for women of color, though, because people always put that extra burden of proof onto their work – as in, they don’t want to vote for them ‘just because.’

Whenever I see movies that have mixed race couple at the center, it is almost always a black man and a white woman. Even in The Martian, which was as diverse a cast as a movie can get, had no women of color. All of the actresses were white with the exception of one brief role of a Chinese official.

It seems odd to me that this is the case where women are concerned, yet it is hard to deny. One great performance this year that demands our attention is Salma Hayek in Beatriz at Dinner. It is the rare film that puts a woman at its center without her being the love interest of the male lead. It hardly ever happens. Not only is Hayek brilliant in the role but the movie itself stands out. This is also true of Okja – the new movie by Joon-ho Bong and starring Seo-Hyun Ahn. Like Beatriz at Dinner, these characters are not there just to enhance or heighten the drama of the male characters – and in fact, shockingly, care about bigger things than whom they may or may not be sleeping with.

It is rare overall to have any movies involving women that are not really about the women but are instead about the male characters. Yet, somehow, here were two films that break out of that pattern. I bring up Queen Sugar on OWN because though it is not a feature film it illustrates beautifully how female characters – and women of color – can have narratives that reach farther than just how they’re positioned against the male characters.

The bottom line with inclusion in Hollywood, with diversity and change, is that more stories by filmmakers of color will lead to more nominations. The Academy is taking extreme measures to hopefully shift the landscape of their own legacy. Halle Berry was a pioneer when she took a chance in Monster’s Ball. She has much life left in her and here’s to hoping her win did not mean nothing. Here’s hoping that the Academy won’t reach 100 years with Berry being the only woman of color to win in lead.