The first and only woman of color to win Oscars' Best Actress title says Hollywood should be more truthful.
- Feb 4, 2016
AceShowbiz - Halle Berry, the first and only woman of color to win Best Actress in Oscars' history, weighs in on the controversial all-white nominees of the 88th Academy Awards. Speaking on stage at the 2016 Makers Conference, the "Monster's Ball" star calls diversity issue in the movie industry "heartbreaking."
"Honestly, that win almost 15 years ago was iconic," she tells her agent Kevin Huvane. "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."
"And to sit here almost 15 years later," she continues, "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."
The problem with Hollywood is lack of honesty, so Berry says. "It's really about truth telling," she explains. "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."
