Marking her second Oscar win in seven years, Emma Stone took home the best actress prize for “Poor Things.”
“My dress is broken. I think it happened during ‘I’m Just Ken,” Stone said while accepting the award.
“The other night, I was panicking, as you can kind of see, happens a lot — that maybe something like this could happen and Yorgos [Lanthimos] said to me, please take yourself out of it,” Stone added. “And he was right, because it’s not about me. It’s about a team that came together to make something greater than the sum of its parts.”
Read more: See all the 2024 Oscar winners here.
After acknowledging all the “Poor Things” cast and crew members, Stone singled out her director, Yorgos Lanthimos, saying, “Thank you for the gift of a lifetime in Bella Baxter.”
Stone previously won the lead actress Oscar for “La La Land” in 2017. She has also received Oscar nominations in the supporting actress category for “Birdman” and “The Favourite,” her first collaboration with Lanthimos. In total, Stone has received five Oscar nominations, four in acting categories and one for best picture as a producer on “Poor Things.”
Stone leads “Poor Things” as Bella Baxter, a distressed pregnant woman who commits suicide and is brought back to life with the brain of her unborn fetus. As Bella, Stone mimics the phases of growing up — from her most primitive stage to full adulthood. She also took home the best actress prizes at this year’s Golden Globes in the musical or comedy category, BAFTAs and Critics Choice Awards.
Stone spoke to Variety during a February cover story about the significance of Bella as a character: “It’s the idea of not living with that self-judgment or shame … or the social contracts that you make as a child growing up. And part of the nature of anxiety is that you’re always watching yourself. In some ways — this is horrible to say — it’s a very selfish condition to have. Not to insult other people with anxiety — I still have it — but it’s because you’re thinking about yourself a lot. You’re thinking about, ‘What’s going to happen to me? What have I said? What have I done?’ Whereas Bella’s way of approaching the world, it’s just about experience. It’s just about how she feels about things.”
She won the Oscar over Lily Gladstone for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Annette Bening for “Nyad,” Carey Mulligan for “Maestro” and Sandra Hüller for “Anatomy of a Fall.”
