Halle Berry, the only black woman to have won the best actress Oscar, says her 2002 victory \u201cdidn\u2019t necessarily change the course of my career\u201d.<\/p>\n
Speaking to The Cut<\/a>\u2019s Monica Corcoran Harel to promote new drama Crime 101<\/a>, Berry said that she anticipated the victory, for Lee Daniels\u2019 Monster\u2019s Ball, would mean \u201cthere was going to be a script truck showing up outside my front door\u201d.<\/p>\n Yet the number of projects she was offered remained stable because of the industry\u2019s continued uncertainty about how to tell the stories of people of colour, said Berry.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile I was wildly proud of it, I was still black that next morning. Directors were still saying, \u2018If 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\u2019s a black movie. Black movies don\u2019t sell overseas.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n A similar sentiment was voiced by Lupita Nyong\u2019o last year, who won the supporting actress Oscar in 2014 for her performance in Steve McQueen\u2019s 12 Years a Slave.<\/p>\n Speaking to CNN<\/a>, Nyong\u2019o said the range of roles she was offered was dismayingly slim. \u201cAfter I won that Academy Award, you\u2019d think, \u2018Oh, I\u2019m gonna get lead roles here and there,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Instead, she said, the conversations usually began: \u201c\u2018Oh, Lupita, we\u2019d like you to play another movie where you\u2019re a slave, but this time you\u2019re on a slave ship.\u2019 Those are the kind of offers I was getting in the months after winning my Academy Award.\u201d<\/p>\n More than 30 black actors \u2013 including Sinners\u2019 Michael B Jordan \u2013 have so far been nominated for the leading actor Oscar, and five have won, while 16 black female actors have been up for the equivalent best actress award.<\/p>\n Twenty-five black male actors have competed for the supporting actor award \u2013 with seven wins \u2013 including Sinners\u2019 Delroy Lindo. His co-star, Wunmi Mosaku, is one of 32 black female actors who have been nominated for supporting actress, with 10 wins. The favourite this year is One Battle After Another\u2019<\/a>s Teyana Taylor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Halle Berry, the only black woman to have won the best actress Oscar, says her 2002 victory \u201cdidn\u2019t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-279759","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}