And the winner of the first Oscar given to a black leading lady should be...

... Halle Berry, an actress challenging Hollywood taboos whose predecessors found fame but no honours in an industry tainted by prejudice.

Just three years ago, for television, the actress Halle Berry played the lead role in a biopic called Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. It was a decent film which covered the basis of a tragic life, and Berry's was a good performance, even if she lacked some of the panache or sexual authority that Dandridge displayed in Carmen Jones (1954), the film for which she received the first Oscar nomination for Best Actress to be gained by a black woman. Dandridge lost; the prize went to Grace Kelly in The Country Girl for a markedly inferior performance, but Kelly was Hollywood's darling, and no one thought Dandridge could beat her.

This year, next Sunday, Berry could win the Best Actress Oscar, for her performance in a small film named Monster's Ball. God knows, it's time for a black actress to win (although Berry actually has a white mother) and surely Kelly won in '54 not for her movie but because the community found her irresistible.

Monster's Ball has had a lot of attention, yet it's a strange picture with as many holes in plausibility as the testimony of an Enron executive. Never mind, Berry is phenomenal as a poor black woman with a bad marriage and a terribly obese son. This is a woman without much education or chance in life, living in rural Georgia. Yet as she loses her husband (to the electric chair) and her son (to a hit-and-run accident), she wins the love of a recent racist, the man who actually supervised her husband's execution. No, it's not exactly believable, and there is another impediment in the performance: Berry, playing an unknown in the backwoods without advantage or budget, is one of the most beautiful women alive.

That's hardly her fault; it's part of the ongoing prejudice of Hollywood towards attractiveness (more deep-seated than racism). And come Sunday night, I don't think it will matter. Berry is amazingly good as a bereft woman, and in the very powerful love-making scenes she shares with Billy Bob Thornton her nakedness goes deeper than skin. It reaches soul. I think she'll win.

If she does, she may mention Dorothy Dandridge, who killed herself in her early 40s, in part because she couldn't get work. Whereas Berry – now 35 – is on a steep rise. In the years since Introducing Dorothy Dandridge she has appeared opposite Warren Beatty in Bulworth, and in Swordfish. She's the female lead in the next Bond film. Win or lose, she will be a television event on Oscars night, just because of her looks. The child of a white mother and a black father, she was raised by her mother. There are those who smile and say she's a very white black, or a black woman that any white guy could get horny over.

But as she has said herself (she has become more outspoken in the press, and funnier, with the confidence that has come from her growth as an actress), in the US being a little black is like being a little pregnant. But that's a line that can send shivers through the South (at least), where plenty of distinguished citizens have a dash of secret black blood in their history.

In plenty of ways the US remains a racist country. Berry could do worse than recount the story of Hattie McDaniel. You know her face and voice, even if the name is unfamiliar. In 1939 she played Mamie, the maid, in Gone With the Wind. She was the first black to win an Oscar, as supporting actress. However, when that famous film premiered in Atlanta, Georgia. the city authorities told its producer, David O Selznick, they hoped he would not bring McDaniel to town with the rest of the cast for the celebration: she would not be welcome; she could not stay at the hotel; she could hardly meet the veterans of the Confederate army who would be wheeled to the show.

Selznick was indignant, but he yielded. And even at the subsequent Oscars ceremony, McDaniel was not asked to sit at the Selznick table; she sat at a corner table for two with her husband. And, when she accepted her Oscar, she recited a speech – written for her by the Selznick office – hoping she had been a credit to her race.

Berry's win is not guaranteed. She has worthy competition: Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge, Sissy Spacek in In the Bedroom, and Judi Dench in Iris. But Berry's work is securely in that league, and Hollywood needs to have a black actress win. Those nominated since Dandridge have been Cicely Tyson in Sounder (1972), Diahann Carroll in Claudine (1974), Whoopi Goldberg in The Color Purple (1985), and Angela Bassett in What's Love Got to Do With It? (1993).

It's not a long list, and it would be wrong to think that black actresses now have an easy life. Time and again Hollywood acts on the assumption that making a lead character black reduces the audience. If a black is in love with a white – and if sex is allowed – the fall-off is greater.

There has still not been a big Hollywood picture in which a black man has a lot of sex with a white woman. And if you reckon that Berry's beauty will carry the day, just realise how many beautiful actresses hit career trouble as they reach 40. And recall the story of Lena Horne – among the most beautiful and greatest of entertainers in the 1940s, and very light-skinned, but compelled to give up the role of Julie in Show Boat (1951) to Ava Gardner, because the sight of a mulatto woman romancing a white man might prompt uprisings. Well, Lena Horne is with us still, and she is likely to be watching on the 24th. In truth, this is more important than the inflated respectability of that little bronzed man.