Oscars 2024: Emma Stone Wins Best Actress Poor Things

It’s been an exciting night for 2023’s best movies as the 96th annual Academy Awards start to wind down. Some of the biggest awards have gone out, and film fans finally know who won the Best Actress race. This has been one of the closest races this year with Lily Gladstone and Emma Stone both competing as the frontrunners for Killers of the Flower Moon and Poor Things, respectively. After months of speculation and various awards season wins, the latest Best Actress winner is… Emma Stone!

Stone’s win for Poor Things marks the star’s second Academy Award. Throughout her career, Stone has been nominated for four acting Oscars, winning Best Actress in 2017 for La La Land. She was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Birdman in 2015 and Best Supporting Actress for The Favourite in 2019. This year, Stone is also nominated in the Best Picture category for producing Poor Things. 

Stone and Gladstone have both taken home big prizes this award season with Stone winning the BAFTA Award for Best Actress while Gladstone took home the SAG prize. They both won in their respective genre categories at the Golden Globes, making their race one of the more interesting ones of the season. At the SAG Awards last month, Stone made headlines for cheering on Gladstone’s win.

In addition to beating Gladstone for the Oscar, Stone also competed against Annette Benning (Nyad), Carey Mulligan (Maestro), and Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall).

What Is Poor Things About?

You can read the description of Poor Things here: “From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale and fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.”

Emma Stone Explains Yorgos Lanthimos’ Directing Style:

During an interview with IndieWire, Stone spoke about playing the reanimated Bella Baxter in Poor Things and revealed what makes a Lanthimos set unique. 

“It was very important to feel that this was an intimate experience no matter how big the sets were,” Stone explained. “There’s nothing better than to be free and experimenting.” 

Lanthimos added, “I knew that I wanted to create this world for Bella to inhabit so that it reflected her individuality and uniqueness … The idea was that we would build everything in the studio, even exteriors so that everything would feel tactile and familiar but also out of this world.”

“We don’t have marks,” Stone added of the film’s production. “Yorgos doesn’t say action. There’s no video village, just Yorgos sitting with his monitor right by the camera. We don’t have stand-ins and we don’t leave set. It feels as small and intimate as humanly possible. The things that are happening from rehearsal or from take to take shift and change as time goes on, so you’re really trusting Yorgos to find that world.”

Congrats to second-time Academy Award winner, Emma Stone! Stay tuned for more Oscars updates as they unfold on ABC.