It was an emotional moment for Emma Stone when she gave her speech for the Best Actress award.
In the film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Stone played Bella Baxter. During her award speech, Stone was clearly overcome with emotion.
The winner of the Best Actress Oscar from the previous year was a universe-hopping laundry owner who, at one point, looked like she had hot dogs for fingers.
This year had to start even stranger, of course.
Emma Stone won the prize for her role as Bella Baxter in the Yorgos Lanthimos-directed film “Poor Things.”
Baxter was once dead but was brought back to life by a crazy scientist who put her unborn child’s brain inside her skull.
The final effect is a fully developed woman with infantile tendencies, who later develops into a child who is experimenting with boundaries and yearns for freedom in a society where males are used to controlling women’s lives.
During her award speech, Stone—who was clearly overwhelmed—talked about a chat she had with regular partner Lanthimos.
“Yorgos told me to pull myself out of it the other night when I was freaking out, as you can kind of see happening a lot, that maybe something like this could happen,” the woman claimed. It’s not about me, so he was correct. It tells the story of a group that joins together to create something more powerful than the sum of its individual parts.
Stone received the award for best actress for the second time, the first being in the 2016 musical “La La Land,” when she played a desperate Hollywood star.
Stone’s Bella Baxter is a delightfully frank, boisterous character who is determined to be allowed to experiment in the surreal, absurdist universe of “Poor Things.” In a standout sequence set in a Portuguese restaurant, Baxter breaks into a frenzied and ridiculous dance, which prompts her partner (Mark Ruffalo) to attempt desperately to match her energy.
In an interview with The Times in November, Stone, 35, said, “She’s drinking up the world around her in such a unique and beautiful way that I just dream I could.”
For Stone’s career, the past year has been somewhat of a turning point as she abruptly veered away from the mainstream parts that helped make her well-known (“Easy A,” “The Help”). In “The Curse,” a parody of a home remodeling show full of small absurdities that nearly surpass the duck-headed bulldog in “Poor Things,” Stone co-starred with Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie on television.
As Stone’s character began to walk and talk, came to terms with her sexuality, learned about the darkest aspects of humanity, and attempted to carve out an adult life for herself, Baxter’s peculiar character arc offered her a unique actor’s playground.
According to Stone, “I felt like I kind of lived with her for a long time,” Vanity Fair reported. “I still talk to Yorgos about how much we miss her now.”
https://youtu.be/Q8urFpWdi9c?si=Exu_eHH9Z6IflRzS