The top honor for costume design went to Ruth Carter for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” the sequel to the 2018 Marvel Studios hit “Black Panther,” for which Ms. Carter also won the costume design award in 2019.
Ruth E. Carter has become the first Black woman to win two Oscars. Ms. Carter has said she designed more than 2,000 costumes for “Wakanda Forever,” for which she drew inspiration from various African cultures. Carter, who in 2019 became the first Black person to win the Oscar for costume design for her work on Marvel’s “Black Panther,” was once again recognized for the film’s sequel, “Wakanda Forever.”
Carter beat out Catherine Martin, who won the BAFTA and Costume Designers Guild awards for her work on Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis.” She also beat Mary Zophres for “Babylon,” Jenny Beaven for “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” and Shirley Kurata for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which was the surprise winner of the Sci-Fi Fantasy award at the CDGA.
Carter has a total of four nominations, including for 1992’s “Malcolm X” and 1997’s “Amistad.” Her credits also include “Selma” and the Tina Turner biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” for which Carter recreated Tina Turner’s most iconic looks from the ’70s and ’80s, including the famous gold metallic fringe dress and high-waisted miniskirts.
In building the costumes of Wakanda, which Carter called one of the biggest challenges of her career, she had to account for the physical immersion of her designs in water. “We put it underwater, and everything just went up. I had to remake things that were tested. I had to weigh them down, and sometimes they were too light, other times they were too heavy,” she told Variety.
Carter, who is Spike Lee’s go-to costume designer, credits the director as being instrumental in changing the way she looks at Hollywood: “‘You walk through Hollywood with your own voice. You walk through there with your portfolio,’ he would say. He gave us that charge.”
In her acceptance speech, Ms. Carter honored her mother, who she said passed away last week at the age of 101 and became an “ancestor.”
“This film prepared me for that moment,” she said during her speech, before referencing the late “Black Panther” star Chadwick Boseman, who passed away in 2020. “Chadwick, please take care of Mom.”
“Thank you to the Academy for recognizing the superhero that is a Black woman,” Ms. Carter said. “She endures, she loves, she overcomes. She is every woman in this film.”
Costumes from all the nominated films were displayed onstage, such as Jobu Tupaki’s priestess-like outfit from “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and Margot Robbie’s red-sash dress from “Babylon.”
