Emma Stone teared up as she took to the stage to accept her second Best Actress Oscar on Sunday for Poor Things. The actress, who previously won for La La Land in 2017, thanked director Yorgos Lanthimos, the entire team behind the film, her husband, and her daughter.
“Boy,” Stone said on stage, clearly flustered. “My dress is broken. I think it happened during ‘I’m Just Ken.’ I’m pretty sure.” Later on, after she regained her composure, she recalled a conversation she’d recently had with Lanthimos.
“The other night I was panicking, as you can kind of see happens a lot,” she said. But she recalled that the director told her, “Take yourself out of it.” That insight hit home. “It’s not about me,” Stone said. “It’s about a team that came together to make something greater than the sum of its parts, and that is the best part of making movies—is all of us together. I am so deeply honored to share this with every cast member, with every crew member, with every single person who poured their love their care and their brilliance into making this film.”
This year, as always, the Best Actress category was absolutely stacked: There was Emma Stone, who stunningly brought to life an innocent, reanimated Victorian heroine Bella Baxter in Lanthimos’s latest bonkers outing; there was Lily Gladstone’s wrenchingly poignant performance as Mollie Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon; and Sandra Hüller’s fierce turn as a novelist accused of murdering her husband in Anatomy of a Fall. Plus, there was Carey Mulligan’s devastating Maestro showing, and Annette Bening as the irrepressibly stubborn author and marathon swimmer Diana Nyad.
Following her historic wins at both the Golden Globes in January and the Screen Actors Guild Awards in February, Gladstone emerged as a frontrunner for the big award at the Oscars. Stone, meanwhile, took home the gold statuette for best actress in a musical or comedy at the Globes, establishing herself as a strong contender as well.
Throughout the night, past category winners presented the nominees, and in an emotional moment, Stone’s Amazing Spider-Man co-star, Sally Field, presented her. Alongside the film’s cast and crew, Stone also thanked her husband and her young daughter, whom she said turned their lives “into Technicolor.” Quoting a Taylor Swift song, Stone added that she loved her young daughter “bigger than the whole sky.”
Stone also did not leave the stage before acknowledging the talented women who’ve been campaigning for the Best Actress award alongside her throughout the awards season.
“The women on this stage, you are all incredible,” Stone said to the past inners. “And the women in this category—Sandra, Annette, Carey, Lily—I share this with you. ... It has been such an honor to do all this together and I hope we get to keep doing more together.”
