If you’re a movie or pop culture buff, Halle Berry’s iconic Oscar win—the first and only win for a black actress in the Academy’s 88-year history—in 2002 is the stuff of daydreams. For this Small Screen Girl whose love affair with entertainment started with the big screen, it wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky achievement attained by a beautiful blonde ingénue, it was a historic moment of 'I-Can-Do-This-Too' inspiration for a black girl with movie-making ambitions.
Fourteen years later, Oscar winner Halle Berry has finally opened up about the recent #OscarsSoWhite controversy...
“In that moment…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 explained at the Makers Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, Buzzfeed.com reports. “And to sit here almost 15 years later, and knowing that another woman of color has not walked through that door, is heartbreaking. I thought that moment was bigger than me. It’s heartbreaking to start to think maybe it wasn’t bigger than me.”
Berry naturally assumed that the offers for movies and television shows would come pouring in like The Real Housewives of Atlanta live-tweets, and again, she'd underestimated the seriousness of Hollywood's diversity issues. So she decided to utilize her gold-anointed acting chops and reputation to kick-start projects focused on women of color. “I realized that I had to be in charge of my own destiny and I had to be a part of the change of our industry, not just sitting around pontificating…and complaining about what’s not right,” Berry said. “I had to actively start to be a part of the change and I realize that was about creating my own projects, not just for me but for other women, other women of color. And that was the path to real change, when we realize we do have the power to do that.” She produced the 2005 TV movie, Lackawanna Blues, Frankie and Alice (2010), and CBS’ recently cancelled alien drama, Extant and the upcoming CBS abduction drama, Kidnap, in which she will also star. The 2016 Oscars mark the second year in a row that not a single actor of color was nominated, while Straight Outta Compton and Creed, films with predominately black casts, did receive nominations, they went to the white writers and white supporting star respectively The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag was created last year by April Reign (@ReignOfApril), NuTribeMagazine's Editor-At-Large and Managing Editor of BroadwayBlack.com. Watch Halle Berry's iconic Oscar win below.
Photo Credit: EOnline.com
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