Why Emma Stone Won Her Second Oscar

Emma Frickin' Stone, two-time Academy Award winner for Best Actress, and yeah, a lot of people were not predicting her to win a few nights ago for Poor Things. Most people were predicting Lily Gladstone was going to win Best Actress this year for Killers of the Flower Moon. I mean, in those two weeks between SAG and the Oscars, what, 90% or more of awards pundits, YouTubers, bloggers, everybody had shifted away from Emma Stone to Lily Gladstone. But you know what? I was one of the very few who stuck to my guns, even in my very final Oscar Predictions video I put out a few days before the ceremony, that Emma Stone was going to win Best Actress. I felt it in my gut, and even going into the ceremony before the awards started being handed out, I felt pretty confident that Stone was going to win. I could have switched to Lily Gladstone. Pretty much everybody was switching to Gladstone, but I refused. I wasn't buying it. I thought Emma Stone was going to win, and she did. For me, there were just so many signs that it was going to happen, and so I thought it was time to break it down. Why did Emma Stone beat Lily Gladstone for Best Actress this year? It didn't just come down to one or two or three things. My name is Brian Rowe. This is The Awards Contender, and these are the 10, yes, the 10 main reasons Emma Stone beat Lily Gladstone at this year's Oscars for Best Actress. Here we go. Number one, Emma Stone's performance in Poor Things has been heralded ever since the film's world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Something that absolutely helped Emma Stone's chances in winning Best Actress was the rave reviews Poor Things received starting at the Venice Film Festival and Telluride Film Festival. I was thrilled to attend Telluride last year for the very first time. I saw some amazing films, many of which went on to be nominated for and win Oscars, but there was nothing like that screening for Poor Things. It was a sold-out crowd, one of the first groups of people to see it, and I knew like an hour in. I was like, holy shit, this film is extraordinary, and Emma Stone is delivering one of the finest performances I have seen in years. And with the movie not being released until December for most audiences, this allowed the buzz to build over many months. Like, I made my Poor Things review in early September, and for many, many weeks I had a lot of people checking out that video, becoming intrigued by the project, and by Emma Stone's performance. And so by the time the movie finally opened and people got a chance to see it, like, they could really understand why this movie was so beloved from festival goers, from critics. This film had such a great awards trajectory, like starting at the film festivals, letting the buzz grow for a while, and then having the movie open in limited release in December, and then slowly go wider in January and February as the film was starting to win awards, be nominated for lots of things, getting the word out early about how monumentally great this film was, and especially that Emma Stone performance. If the reviews in early September had not been raves, I don't think Emma Stone could have pulled off a win in the end. Probably a nomination, but she did need that early buzz that lasted for months to keep her in the game, in the conversation, leading all the way into awards season and her eventual Oscar win. Poor Things premiering at the Venice Film Festival and getting all of those early rapturous reviews helped her big time. Reason number two is that Emma Stone won the most televised prizes. Yes, she missed at SAG, and we're going to talk about that. It is a big hit to your Oscar chances if you don't win at SAG, but as we've learned here and there, it doesn't necessarily mean you're out of the game. I think something that helped Emma Stone a lot was that except SAG, she basically won everywhere she needed to, especially at the televised award ceremonies, starting at the Golden Globes, where Lily Gladstone won Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama, and Emma Stone won Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. And then there was the Critics' Choice Awards, where Emma Stone won Best Actress over Lily Gladstone. The big prize Emma Stone really needed to win was at BAFTA. A lot of people were predicting Sandra Huler was going to win there for Anatomy of a Fall, and I got very close to predicting that. It felt like it could happen, and in hindsight, if Sandra Huler had won at BAFTA and then Lily Gladstone had won at SAG, part of me wonders if Gladstone might have pulled off a win at the Oscars in the end, because then all Emma Stone would have had was Golden Globe and Critics' Choice. And in this day and age, I mean, ask Angela Bassett last year. Just having Golden Globe and Critics' Choice is not enough. You need a big industry prize, so that BAFTA victory for Stone was essential, and it also helped her momentum because she had won at the Globes and at Critics' Choice and then at BAFTA. I mean, she was kind of steamrolling there for a while, and most everybody was predicting Stone to win at SAG. If Emma Stone had won at SAG, nobody would have questioned her victory at the Oscars, and that's also partly why I was like, well, hold on. Let's not count out Emma Stone yet just because she lost at SAG. I mean, Lily Gladstone won a lot of the Critics' prizes early in the season, as we found out with Charles Melton in May-December. Critics' prizes only go so far, and they don't really mean a whole lot when it comes to an Oscar victory, sometimes even an Oscar nomination. So yeah, at the end of the day, Emma Stone winning at Golden Globes and Critics' Choice helped, but especially that BAFTA win helped ensure her Oscar victory a few weeks later. Reason number three is that Poor Things as a movie had more strength going into Oscars night than Killers of the Flower Moon did. Honestly, in the days leading up to the Oscars, what made me most confident that Emma Stone was going to win Best Actress was how Killers of the Flower Moon just had not performed very well throughout the season. All it really won at the was Best Actress for Lily Gladstone at Golden Globes and SAG. Like, the movie was not competitive in other categories. It was nominated for a lot of things from Golden Globes all the way to Oscars, and I think people looked at that as, well, you know, it's not winning a lot, but it's getting nominated across the board in Best Picture and Best Director and Best Supporting Actor and things, so Lily Gladstone can still win. But I do think in this day and age, to guarantee a major Oscar victory, your movie needs to be competitive before the Oscars at some televised award shows, not just in one category, but in a variety of categories. And, I mean, Martin Scorsese was never going to beat Christopher Nolan for Best Director, but, like, at BAFTA, Killers of the Flower Moon could have won a couple technical prizes. Maybe we could have had a surprise supporting actor win for Robert De Niro or something. I do think Gladstone's chances at the Oscars would have been helped a little bit if Killers of the Flower Moon had won something the whole award season at the televised ceremonies in any other category. It would have showed the Now, compare that to Poor Things, which, at Golden Globes, not only won Best Actress for Emma Stone, but also won Best Motion Picture, Comedy, or Musical, so it did win a Best Picture prize at Golden Globes. And then, especially at BAFTA, it did very well, not only winning Actress for Stone, but also in the tech categories, winning Best Makeup, winning Best Production Design, winning Best Costumes, and winning Best Visual Effects, which it wasn't even nominated for at the Oscars. Poor Things won five prizes at BAFTA. That was a lot, and it showed there was, going into Oscars night, more strength for Poor Things than Killers of the Flower Moon. And, sure, at SAG, Poor Things didn't do very well. It didn't win anything, whereas Killers of the Flower Moon So, you could have looked at SAG and said, okay, that's the last big televised ceremony. They didn't go for Poor Things. They did go for Killers of the Flower Moon in one big category. So, Gladstone can take this, in the end, over Stone. But now, let's get into reason number four, which is Best Actress winners at SAG do not always go on to win the Best Actress Oscar. I feel like a lot of pundits, a lot of people who were predicting Lily Gladstone, were paying way too much attention to SAG, as if it was the be-all and end-all. As I said before, Emma Stone absolutely had the momentum, winning at Golden Globe and Critics' Choice and BAFTA, and a lot of people predicted Stone to win at SAG. And then, when Gladstone won, everybody just abandoned Stone, like she had zero chance. And I was like, well, wait a second here. It's not like a Best Actress win at SAG always results in an Oscar victory. Viola Davis, in 2021, won Best Actress at SAG for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and then she lost the Oscar to Frances McDormand for Nomadland. And then, two years before that, in 2019, Glenn Close won Best Actress at SAG for The Wife, and then famously lost the Oscar on her seventh nomination to Olivia Colman for The Favorites, another Yorgos Lanthimos movie, right? Now, those are the only two examples of the last decade where the SAG Award winner for Best Actress did not go on to win the Oscar. But pretty much every other year, somebody was steamrolling through the season. Brie Larson for Room, Frances McDormand for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Renee Zellweger for Judy. I mean, sometimes when they're winning everything, there's no story. They win at SAG and at BAFTA, and then they win at the Oscars. The other thing people were paying way too close attention to was how this year's Best Actress race was very similar to last year's Best Actress race. Everybody was thinking, oh, well, it's the same trajectory, and Gladstone won at Golden Globes. She might have lost at Critics' Choice and BAFTA, but then, like Michelle Yeoh, she won at SAG. So, it's just going to be last year all over again in this category, and Gladstone will win at the Oscars. But what I kept saying in my prediction videos, what I was saying to friends and people who were on the Gladstone train, I was like, but that was a different scenario. Everything, everywhere, all at once last year was dominating. It was winning all over the place. It was winning at PGA and DGA, and it was winning SAG Ensemble and Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress at SAG, and going into the Oscars, that movie was the clear frontrunner to win Best Picture and Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, whereas Killers of the Flower Moon was not expected to win anything except for maybe Best Actress this year. So, the Michelle Yeoh-Lily Gladstone comparison did not hold water with me. I thought this year's Best Actress race was very different, and at the end of the day, I was like, just because Gladstone won SAG, that does not mean this race is over. Everybody had, like, thrown up their hands and said, oh, it's going to be out of it, and I'm like, what? Hold on. Like, Emma Stone has been doing very well, and as I said, a SAG win for Best Actress does not 100% guarantee you the Oscar win, so that was a factor here too. Reason number five, and I do think this is a big one as well, Lily Gladstone did not get a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress. I always maintained Lily Gladstone missing a nomination at BAFTA was a huge hit to her potentially winning at the Oscars, even with that SAG award trophy. I just kept going back to, but, like, she didn't even get nominated at BAFTA. Last year, Michelle Yeoh might have lost to Blanchett at BAFTA, but Yeoh was at least nominated there, and going back to that word strength, I felt like Killers of the Flower Moon needed more strength at BAFTA, and it could have at least gotten a nomination for Gladstone there, and as we saw at this year's Oscars, the international voting body is a huge factor now when it comes to Oscar wins, because BAFTA matched the Oscars in every category except visual effects, because Poor Things was not nominated in that category at the Oscars. I do maintain if Poor Things had gotten into visual effects at the Academy Awards, it would have won over Godzilla Minus One. I mean, very few people were predicting the zone of interest to beat Oppenheimer at the Oscars for Best Sound. A lot people, including myself, were predicting Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse to win Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, but it went to The Boy and the Heron, which won in that category at BAFTA, so even though BAFTA last year didn't match the Oscars very well, this year it was kind of stunning how closely they aligned, which tells me the increasingly growing international voting body for the Academy Awards should play a major role in your final Oscar voting, and it was like nobody seemed to care that Emma Stone won at BAFTA. It was like, oh, that one doesn't really matter. It all comes down to Lily Gladstone's SAG win, and as we found out in the top eight categories, in the below-the-line categories, BAFTA was, in a way, the most important televised precursor ceremony, and Lily Gladstone being snubbed there for a nomination should have told more people she is vulnerable. It showed that not everybody loved her performance, and that going into those final few weeks, even with that SAG win, Gladstone still very much had an uphill battle to a potential Oscar victory. Reason number six is that people put way too much emphasis on narrative. It is what I kept hearing in the days after SAG, so many people were jumping ship on Emma Stone and going to Gladstone, not only for that big victory, but because a narrative was growing. In a close race between Gladstone and Stone, narrative was going to win the day. The Academy can't possibly pass up giving an indigenous person the Best Actress trophy, kind of like how last year Michelle Yeoh became only the second woman of color to ever win Best Actress for Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. And so this year, they are going to want to do that again, and I just don't always buy into this idea that narrative will win out in the end. I mean, I just kept thinking back to 2021, when everybody thought Chadwick Boseman, the late, great Chadwick Boseman, was going to win Best Actor at the 93rd Academy Awards for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. He had mostly swept the season. He won at Golden Globes and Critics' Choice and SAG. The only thing he missed was BAFTA. That award went to Anthony Hopkins for The Father, but The Father was such a late-breaking movie, and as we found out during that Oscar ceremony in 2021, they were leaving Best Actor for last. Like, they were going to present Best Picture before Best Actress and Best Actor, and so that seems so obvious. Of course, Chadwick Boseman is going to win. It's going to end the ceremony. It's going to be this big emotional moment. Talk about a narrative. Of course, Boseman is going to take this, and then Joaquin Phoenix announced the winner of Best Actor as Anthony Hopkins in The Father. Hopkins wasn't even there, and then the show just ended. It was the most bizarre Oscar anticlimax ever, right? And so, I was thinking about that moment in the last few weeks. I'm like, I mean, if there was a narrative at all in the last decade, it was that narrative for Boseman, and he didn't win in the end. They went with Anthony Hopkins, who had won at BAFTA, so he did have that one major televised prize, and so I felt like even though Emma Stone didn't have the kind of narrative Lily Gladstone absolutely had, I just felt at the end of the day, that lack of a narrative wasn't going to hurt Stone in the end. Reason number seven is category confusion. Now, let me start by saying I think Lily Gladstone made the right decision. Even though she's not in the whole movie, I believe I read she's in about 27% of the narrative, something around 55-56 minutes of the three and a half hour running time. She is absolutely the lead female character of that movie, and so much of that narrative hangs on her character and her story. One of my favorite acting Oscar wins of all time is Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, and he's in like 20 minutes of that movie. I mean, based on screen time, that is a supporting role for sure, but because of his presence, you feel him all throughout that movie, even when he's not on screen. I have always believed that to be kind of a lead role in that film, and I felt the same way about Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon. It's not just about running time. I mean, if she was in like two scenes, then okay, but she's absolutely in enough of the movie to qualify for lead actress. I think it's cool when an actor is kind of on the cusp and they go for lead and not supporting. I have always felt that Viola Davis should have gone lead actress for Fences in 2017. Maybe she would have beaten Emma Stone, who won that year, for La La Land. I've always felt it is easier to win an Oscar in supporting when you have a role that's in a lot of the movie. Lily Gladstone could have gone supporting. You could have made that case, and we'll never know how that would have played out. Would Davine Joy Randolph still have swept? Would Gladstone had beaten Randolph at many of these shows? We'll never know, but so even though I think Gladstone made the right choice going lead actress, there was confusion among some. Like, is this really a lead performance? I think it's more of a supporting performance, and the one thing that does hurt Gladstone by going lead there is that we're comparing a performance that's in 27% of a movie to Emma Stone in Poor Things, who I believe is in about 95-96% of the film. Poor Things is two hours and 20 minutes long, and Emma Stone is in almost the entire movie. So that absolutely gives Stone an advantage. She's in way more of her film, and she's doing such a dynamite phenomenal performance when you have voters comparing Gladstone, who's only in about a quarter of Killers of the Flower Moon, to Emma Stone, who's like the entire show of Poor Things. That category confusion, the questioning, I do think that hurt Gladstone's chances for the Oscar in the end, even though I'm very happy with the choice she ended up making. Reason number eight is that in this day and age, it doesn't really matter if you've won an Oscar already. The other thing I kept hearing over and over in the weeks leading up to the Oscars was that they're not going to give Emma Stone Best Actress because she's already won Best Actress seven years ago for La La Land, and Emma Stone is relatively young. She won her first Oscar for La La Land when she was in her 20s, and now she's in her mid-30s, and so how could the Academy give her a second Best Actress trophy this early in her career? And I'm like, well, wait a second. Let's go back a few decades to Jodie Foster, who won two Oscars within three years in the Best Actress category when she was only in her 20s for both trophies. Her first was for The Accused in 1989, and her second was for The Silence of the Lambs in 1992. They didn't have a problem giving the very young Foster a second trophy in three years. And then there was also Hilary Swank a few years later. She won her first Best Actress Oscar for Boys Don't Cry in 2000, and then won her second Best Actress Oscar five years later in 2005 for Million Dollar Baby, and Hilary Swank was only 30 years old when she won her second Oscar. Emma Stone is 35. So that argument wasn't holding water with me, especially, I would say, in the modern era. Frances McDormand winning her second Best Actress Oscar in 2018 for three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, and then three years later she gets a third Best Actress Oscar for Nomadland. When McDormand won for Nomadland, I said, okay, the argument that you've already won before and so you can't win again, that argument is dead to me. I think if you give a phenomenal performance in a movie everybody loves and you already won an Oscar a few years ago or many years ago or whatever, like, I don't think that diminishes your chances. I mean, you could point to Cate Blanchett for Tar last year. If, let's say, Blanchett had never won an Oscar in her long career, she might have had more of a shot to win for that role. But again, everything everywhere all at once was dominating to such an extent, especially at the end of that award season. I still think Michelle Yeoh would have won anyway. So when it came to the Best Actress race this year, I really didn't think Emma Stone having already won an Oscar for La La Land hurt her very much. I don't think voters care, really. I think a lot of voters just go with the performance that they love the most, and this year it was Emma Stone. Reason number nine, as we get closer to the end here, is Emma Stone's wide body of work. I do think that played a factor, too. Maybe not as big as some of these other reasons I've talked about, but Emma Stone's career goes back to the 2000s, starting mostly in comedies like Superbad and then Easy A, and she had three Oscar nominations behind her, starting with Birdman in the Best Supporting Actress category in 2015. Then she won Best Actress for La La Land in 2017. And between La La Land and Poor Things, she had another Oscar nomination in Best Supporting Actress for The Favorite in 2019. So she is an actress everybody really admires, and seeing her career trajectory the last few years has been very exciting. I do think Emma Stone gets better and better with every film, every role. It's been so exciting to see all the chances she takes, not only on the big screen but also the small screen. One other little reason that she might have won for Poor Things was her remarkable performance in The Curse, which was on Showtime between like November and January. It was kind of divisive show. I didn't love all of it, but it had a spectacular final episode I have not forgotten, and I think the best thing about that show was Emma Stone's performance. She is great in that, too. So a lot of goodwill has continued to build for Emma Stone since her Oscar win seven years ago, and Lily Gladstone has been doing very good work for many years. One of my favorite performances of 2016, the same year as La La Land, was Gladstone in Certain Women, directed by Kelly Reichardt. She is sublime in that movie. I thought she deserved an Oscar nomination in Supporting Actress for that role, but compared to Emma Stone, she's not as well-known, she hasn't been around as long, and she hasn't appeared in a ton of big projects. And when it comes to winning an Academy Award, sometimes that helps, too. Having a bigger body of work, many, many performances in a variety of genres that have been acclaimed, I do think that helped Emma Stone as well. But really, seriously, now, at the end of the day, having gone through all of these reasons, I do think they are all important as to why Emma Stone ultimately won the Best Actress Oscar for Poor Things. In some ways, the most important reason is reason number 10. Emma Stone gave the performance of the year. I mean, what a spectacular, transcendent, bold, challenging, courageous performance Emma Stone gives in Poor Things. That entire film hangs on her character and that performance working. If Emma Stone had not brought her A-game to Poor Things, the whole film would have crumbled and it probably wouldn't have gotten nominated for anything. No matter how beautiful it looks, no matter how great the screenplay is, if Emma Stone's performance wasn't at such a high level in one scene after another for two plus hours, you could have kissed award season goodbye to It wouldn't have happened. You needed the right actor to play Bella Baxter with everything she had. Someone at the absolute height of their craft and their talents. As I said, Emma Stone just gets better and better with every film she appears in. I thought she was better in The Favourites than she was in La La Land. And with Poor Things, honestly, Emma Stone gave the performance of her career. This is a career-defining performance of the greatest kind, and in a close acting race for the Oscar, I do think the best performance of 2023 ultimately won out in the end. Now, let me end here by saying I adore Lily Gladstone. I think her role in this award season was crucial and fantastic. I cannot wait to see where her career goes from here. I mean, I know she has a TV show airing soon on Hulu, and she has at least three movies in the can that are coming soon to a theater near you. I am 100% confident Lily Gladstone will be back at the Oscars, and when she returns, it is going to be glorious. Maybe she'll win on her second time around. I would love that. But yeah, this year at the 96th Academy Awards, I do think the right performance won Best Actress. I have been a fan of Emma Stone for a very long time. I have liked and loved so many of her performances, going back to Superbad in 2007. But holy shit, did she outdo herself in Poor Things. What a phenomenal performance, what an amazing movie, and what an extraordinary all-timer Best Actress Oscar win that is. Emma Stone for Poor Things. Thanks so much for watching and subscribing, and let me know in the comments below what do you think are the most important reasons why Emma Stone ultimately won the Academy Award and Best Actress for Poor Things over Lily Gladstone, and we'll see you next time at the Awards Contender.