Angela Bassett wins at Critics Choice Awards

• Forever Angela Bassett!
• At the 2023 Critics’ Choice Awards on Sunday night, the actress was recognized for her work.
• In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and took up the best supporting actress trophy.

The Angela Bassett and other candidates were Janelle Monáe, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kerry Condon, Stephanie Hsu, and Jessie Buckley from the film Women Talking, The Banshees of Inisherin, and Everything Everywhere All at Once (Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery).

A few members of her “Disney and Marvel family,” including Wakanda Forever director/co-writer Ryan Coogler, were acknowledged by Bassett, 64, near the end of her award speech. She also expressed pride in the work that the two of them had done on both the 2018 sequel and Black Panther’s precursor.

The late Chadwick Boseman, who played King T’Challa in the original movie and passed away in 2020 after a 4-year struggle with cancer, was also thanked by the actress for “your love and light around us.”

Without you, we could not have made history, either back then or now.

Bassett claimed that of all of her coworkers on the Black Panther movies, “We demonstrated to the world our ability to produce and direct a billion-dollar box office hit. And my hope is that the door will stay open and that there will be no stopping future Black authors and artists from joining us.”

In an earlier part of her speech, Bassett—who was also named best supporting actress at the Golden Globe Awards on Tuesday—remembered how, while on a school trip to Washington, D.C., she had been watching James Earl Jones in a Kennedy Center production of Of Mice and Men—she “fell in love with acting.”

“At that very moment, I realised that I wanted to do this. I wanted to be able to elicit from people the same emotions that I experienced while watching those actors pull me in, scene after scene, to their story.

While acknowledging that she “did not know what the path would look like even after [she] got to Yale drama school” and “was not sure what might be reasonably possible,” Bassett is appreciative of the “giants” in the field who paved the way, specifically “Black actresses with extraordinary talent, like Ruby Dee and Cicely Tyson, Rosalind Cash and Diahann Carroll.”

Their remarkable work, especially at the time, convinced me there was a place for me in the entertainment industry.

“Or another friend, my roommate from college: ‘I kept saying, they have a Heart-Shaped Herb. Shuri will come up with something. She’s going to come back. I kept holding on until the end, because by some miracle, Ramonda’s going to come back. She’s going to cough,’ ” Bassett shared. “They wanted to believe that was not the end,” she added. The 28th annual Critics’ Choice Awards are currently airing live on The CW.

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