Angela Bassett received her honorary Oscar earlier this year but can still recall her “supreme disappointment” in losing at the 2023 Academy Awards.
Many were outraged when Bassett lost the Best Supporting Actress category to Jamie Lee Curtis last year. Bassett was up for her performance in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever but lost to Curtis for her work in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
In January, Bassett accepted an Honorary Academy Award at the 14th Governors Awards.
However, she got candid in an OWN Spotlight
with Oprah Winfrey about last year’s Oscar loss.“I thought I handled it well. And that was my intention, to handle it very well,” she shared. “It was, of course, a supreme disappointment. And disappointment is human. I was disappointed and I handled it like a human being. I was [gracious] for myself and my children who were there with me.”
Bassett was featured in a profile
for People last week where her husband Courtney B. Vance sounded off about his wife losing out on an Academy Award not once, but twice.Fans of the 9-1-1 actress recall Bassett’s powerhouse portrayal of Tina Turner in the celebrated 1993 biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It. Her performance was critically acclaimed, but Holly Hunter took home Best Actress for The Piano at the 1994 Oscars.
“The honorary Oscar was a wonderful night, but I flashed back to 30 years ago when
they didn’t call her name, and then when they didn’t call her name last March,” Vance said. “This was an opportunity for her to stand up there. A lot of people saw it, but not the billion people that would see it at the Oscars. But it meant everything to her.”
Vance noted how “shy” Bassett is and how “she’ll never toot her own horn.” Now Bassett finally has an Academy Award of her own, even if it is honorary.
“One of the things that always that I say to myself and to my kids is, ‘Find the good and praise it,'” she said.
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