*Halle Berry, the first woman of color to win the Academy Award for Best Actress, weighed in Tuesday on how far Hollywood has come regarding racial diversity in light of this year’s #OscarSoWhite controversy.
“Honestly, that win almost 15 years ago was iconic,” she told CAA’s Kevin Huvane at the 2016 Makers Conference, a leadership gathering near LA. “It was important to me, but I had the knowing in the moment that it was bigger than me. I believed that in that moment, that when I said, ‘The door tonight has been opened,’ I believed that with every bone in my body, that this was going to incite change because this door, this barrier, had been broken.”
Berry won her Oscar in 2002 for playing the widow of an executed inmate in “Monster’s Ball.” During her emotional acceptance speech, she said: “This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It’s for the women that stand beside me — Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”
“And to sit here almost 15 years later,” she continued on Tuesday, “and knowing that another woman of color has not walked through that door, is heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking, because I thought that moment was bigger than me. It’s heartbreaking to start to think maybe it wasn’t bigger than me. Maybe it wasn’t. And I so desperately felt like it was.”
“It’s really about truth telling,” added Berry. “And as filmmakers and as actors, we have a responsibility to tell the truth. And the films, I think, that are coming out of Hollywood aren’t truthful. And the reason they’re not truthful, these days, is that they’re not really depicting the importance and the involvement and the participation of people of color in our American culture.”
We Publish News 24/7. Don’t Miss A Story. Click HERE to SUBSCRIBE to Our Newsletter Now!
