At the time, Berry said she didn’t expect to snag the award.

“Back in those days, if you didn’t win the Globe, you really didn’t get the Academy Award,” she told the Times. “So I’d pretty much resigned myself to believing, ‘It’s great to be here, but I’m not going to win.'”

After Berry won the Oscar, she gave a moving speech acknowledging the impact of the moment.

“This moment is so much bigger than me,” Berry said during her speech. “It’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”

But 20 years later, Berry feels differently about that night.

“It didn’t open the door,” Berry, who is still the only Black actress to have won the award, told the Times. “The fact that there’s no one standing next to me is heartbreaking.”

Berry said that while actors cannot measure their success by the amount of awards they’ve won, they do signify that the entertainment industry recognizes their talent.

“Awards are the icing on the cake — they’re your peers saying you were exceptionally excellent this year — but does that mean that if we don’t get the exceptionally excellent nod, that we were not great, and we’re not successful, and we’re not changing the world with our art, and our opportunities aren’t growing?” she said.

Berry is determined to create those opportunities herself. As Blavity previously reported, the actress’ action drama Bruised, which she starred in and directed, came out on Netflix last year. It’s a career milestone Berry is extremely proud of.

“Twenty years ago, a Black woman directing a movie about the fight genre?” she said, according to the Times. “I don’t think I could’ve even wrapped my brain around it. That’s proof to me that things are changing.”

According to The New York Post, no Black actresses were nominated by the academy in the category of best actress in 2022.