ABSTRACT
Prior to the televised broadcast of the Academy Awards in 1991, Barbara Walters’ traditional pre-Oscar interview show included a segment with Whoopi Goldberg, who was highly favored to win the supporting-actress Oscar for her role in Ghost. Goldberg noted that were she to win (which she did), it would be the first such award in fifty years-referring, of course, to Hattie McDaniel’s supportingactress Oscar in 1939 for Gone with the Wind, in the stereotypical maid/ mammy role that she re-created shortly after in The Great Lie. Intention-ally or not, Goldberg’s remark suggested that as far as black actresses and the roles they enact in Hollywood cinema are concerned, little has changed in the years separating Hattie McDaniel and Whoopi Goldberg.
