It wouldn’t be the Oscars without a surprise win.
While Lily Gladstone was a strong front-runner this award season for her portrayal of Mollie Burkhart in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flowers Moon (and was set to make history if she won), Emma Stone took home the prize for Actress in a Leading Role tonight at the 96th Academy Awards.
Stone won for her performance as Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, a Frankenstein-esque tale of a woman who is resurrected by a scientist and reenters the world with the brain of a toddler. Stone has been praised for her performance in the dark comedy, and Poor Things was a big winner at tonight’s ceremony, also taking home awards for Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling.
Stone was visibly shocked when her name was announced by last year’s winner, Michelle Yeoh. Onstage, she expressed her gratitude to the film’s cast and crew and her family.
“The women on this stage, you are all incredible, and the women in this category—Sandra, Annette, Carey, Lily—I share this with you. I’m in awe of you. It has been such an honor to do this all together, and I hope we continue to do more together,” Stone said. “The other night I was panicking, as you can, that maybe something like this could happen, and Yorgos told me: ‘Please take yourself out of it’—and he was right, because it’s not about me. It’s the team that came together to make something better than the sum of its parts. That’s the best part about making movies, is all of us together.”
Bianca Betancourt is the culture editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com, where she covers all things film, TV, music, and more. When she's not writing, she loves impulsively baking a batch of cookies, re-listening to the same early-2000s pop playlist, and stalking Mariah Carey's Twitter feed.
