African Americans Win Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Actress

By Wendy S. Ross
Washington File Staff Writer

("A Beautiful Mind" is Best Picture, Howard is Best Director)

For the first time in the 74-year history of the Academy Awards ceremonies, a pair of African Americans captured the Best Actor and Best Actress awards in ceremonies March 24 in Los Angeles.

Halle Berry won for her performance in "Monster's Ball," playing the bereaved widow of a death row inmate who falls in love with a racist prison guard. She is the first African American to win the Oscar for Best Actress.

"Oh, my God," Berry sobbed between words when her name was announced. "This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. ... This is for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door has been opened."

Whoopi Goldberg, the show's host, said of Berry's win. "It has been a very large door, and I'm glad she is the one who kicked it down."

Berry won Best Actress honors over a strong field of nominees including veteran actresses Sissy Spacek for "In the Bedroom," Nicole Kidman for "Moulin Rouge," Judi Dench for "Iris" and Renee Zellweger for "Bridget Jones's Diary."

Denzel Washington, who previously had won Best Supporting Actor in 1989 for his role in the movie "Glory," won Best Actor this year for his role as a rogue cop in the movie "Training Day."

The other Best Actor nominees this year were Russell Crowe for his performance in "A Beautiful Mind," Sean Penn for "I Am Sam," Will Smith for "Ali," and Tom Wilkinson for "In the Bedroom."

Washington was the second African American to win the top award. Sidney Poitier won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1963 for his role in the movie "Lillies of the Field."

Poitier, the first African American actor to dominate the film screen in the United States, coincidentally, was in the audience last night, having earlier in the evening been given an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievements -- "for his extraordinary performances and unique presence on the screen, and for representing the motion picture industry with dignity, style and intelligence throughout the world," according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood.

Poitier, who is now 78 years old, said that when he first arrived in Hollywood back in 1949 at the youthful age of of 22 "no route had been established to where I was hoping to go." He paid tribute at the ceremonies to the white producers and directors who had helped him break the color barrier for Hollywood leading men back then, and said he accepted his honorary Oscar "in memory of all of the African-American actors who went before me, on whose shoulders I stand."

"A Beautiful Mind" -- about Nobel Prize winning Princeton mathematician John Nash and his struggle with the mental illness schizophrenia -- won Best Picture. The other nominees for Best Picture were: "The Lord of the Rings," "Moulin Rouge," "Gosford Park" and "In the Bedroom."

"A Beautiful Mind" also won three other awards: Best Director went to Ron Howard; Best Supporting Actress to Jennifer Connelly, who played Nash's supportive wife; and Best Adapted Screenplay to Akiva Goldsman for her adaptation of Sylvia Nasar's book of the same title as the movie. Nash and his wife were in the audience.

The movie "Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring," based on the fantasy books about hobbits by J.R.R. Tolkien, which had received the most nominations prior to the ceremony, also won four Oscars -- for makeup, cinematography, original score, and visual effects.

The Best Supporting Actor award went to Jim Broadbent, for his role as Iris Murdoch's husband in the movie "Iris" about the writer's life and descent into Alzheimer's disease.

The Best Foreign Film went to "No Man's Land" -- a Bosnia-Herzegovina film about war.

French filmmakers Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and Denis Poncet won Best Documentary Feature for the film "Murder on a Sunday Morning," the story of two black teenagers in Florida arrested and accused of a crime they did not commit.

The Oscar for Best Original Song went to song-writer Randy Newman for "If I Didn't Have You," from the movie "Monsters, Inc." He had been nominated 16 times previously but never won. "I don't want your pity," he joked to the star studded audience, adding how astounded he was that he had finally received an Oscar.

Also winning Oscars: "Gosford Park," for Julian Fellowes' original screenplay; "Moulin Rouge" for costume design and art direction; and "Black Hawk Down" for sound and editing.

"Shrek" -- based on a children's book by William Steig -- won the first award ever given in the new category of Best Animated Feature Film.

The show began with actor Tom Cruise walking out to center stage to ask why movies matter. In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, a friend wondered, he said, "Is it important what we do?" He then answered -- "More than ever."

Writer-director-actor Woody Allen, who has won Oscars in the past but had never before attended the glittery annual celebration, presented a montage of film clips about his beloved New York City.

Robert Redford, received an honorary Oscar for his achievements over the years in the film industry. In a press release, the Academy emphasized Redford's creation of the Sundance Institute for encouraging independent filmmaking as a primary reason for his honor. Redford received an Oscar for Best Director for 1980's "Ordinary People."

This year's awards were the first Oscar ceremony actually held in Hollywood since 1959. A gleaming new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences theater, at the corner of Hollywood and Highland boulevards recently opened and is expected to become the official venue for the Academy Awards ceremonies each year.

The ceremony was the longest in academy history -- clocking in at four hours and 21 minutes, beating the year 2000 ceremonies by 12 minutes.

Only four other African Americans, besides Poitier, Washington and Berry, have ever won Oscars. They were Hattie McDaniel who won in 1939 for Best Supporting Actress in "Gone with the Wind"; Louis Gossett, Jr., in 1982 for Best Supporting Actor in "An Officer and a Gentleman", Whoopi Goldberg in 1990 for Best Supporting Actress in "Ghost" and Cuba Gooding, Jr. in 1996 for Best Supporting Actor in "Jerry Maguire".