Angela Bassett is opening up about how she felt when she didn’t win the Academy Award for Supporting Actress last year. Sitting down with Oprah Winfrey for the OWN Spotlight series, Bassett said she was “gobsmacked” when she lost the award after being nominated for her role in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
The 65-year-old actress added that she felt that she handled the situation very well as she watched the award go to Jamie Lee Curtis.
“That was my intention, to handle it very well,” Bassett told Winfrey. “It was, of course, a supreme disappointment, and disappointment is human. So I thought, yes, I was disappointed and I handled it like a human being.”
Oprah also revealed that she was shocked when Bassett didn’t get the Oscar.
“I just knew your name was going to be called,” Winfrey said. “I was beside myself [when it wasn’t]. We were beside ourselves.”
For Bassett, it was important to handle the disappointment with grace.
“There are going to be these moments of disappointment that they are going to experience. But how do you handle yourself in the midst of them?” Bassett said. “We’re going to smile, we’re going to be gracious, we’re going to be kind — we got to party anyway.”
Bassett was only nominated for an Oscar once before her 2023 nod. That nomination came in 1994 when she received a nomination for Best Actress after portraying the late Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It, Variety reported. Bassett did, however, win a Golden Globe for her performance.
Bassett said she didn’t even see the script for Black Panther when she agreed to take the role.
“Some of these places are secretive with the scripts, but [director Ryan Coogler] said, ‘Queen.’ For years, I had been saying … when they ask what else you want to play, I’d say, ‘I want to play a queen.’ I manifested it, evidently,” Bassett said. “Because I hadn’t seen it. It’s not queen for me, it’s queen for us. We are queens. My mother, my auntie, you. We all are. So often Black women are considered at the low end of the totem. No!”
As Blavity reported, Bassett received an Honorary Oscar in January at the 14th Annual Governors Awards. Bassett paid tribute to some of her peers, including Halle Berry and Whoopi Goldberg, during her speech, saying she wants more recognition for more Black women.
Bassett referred to the stars as “beacons of possibility and hope for little Black and brown girls who aspire to one day pursue the dream of becoming an actor.”
