Emma Stone just scored her second Oscar win. The star, 35, won Best Actress at the 2024 Academy Awards on Sunday. Past winners Michelle Yeoh, Charlize Theron, Jennifer Lawrence, Sally Field and Jessica Lange presented the award. “My voice is also a little gone — whatever,” Stone said in her acceptance speech, after also acknowledging her “broken” dress mishap.
She added, “The other night, I was panicking, as you can kind of see, happens a lot. That maybe something like this could happen, and Yorgos said to me, ‘Please take yourself out of it.’ 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. And that is the best part about making movies. It’s 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 and their care and their brilliance into the making of this film,” said Stone. Stone later added, “I know I have to wrap up, but I really just want to thank my family. My mom, my brother Spencer, my dad, my husband Dave [McCary], I love you so much.”
“And, most importantly, my daughter, who’s gonna be 3 in three days and has turned our lives technicolor,” the star continued, before quoting pal Taylor Swift’s lyric: “I love you bigger than the whole sky, my girl.” (Swift’s song “Bigger Than the Whole Sky” is from her Grammy-winning album Midnights.)
The other nominees in the category were Annette Bening for Nyad, Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon, Sandra Hüller for Anatomy of a Fall, and Carey Mulligan for Maestro. Stone landed her fourth acting acknowledgment at the Oscars. As Bella Baxter, the actress jaunts around Victorian London with the brain of an unborn child.
Stone’s performance in the Yorgos Lanthimos–directed comedy won her a Golden Globe, Critics Choice Award and a BAFTA. She last took home the Oscar for her leading role in 2016’s La La Land. Stone recently told NPR that she wouldn’t have made it to this point in her Hollywood career without the support of her parents.
“I know that none of this, obviously, would be possible without their support, especially at that age,” she said. “I mean, it wasn’t like I had graduated high school and I said, ‘Okay, bye. I’m taking a plane or taking a bus or driving myself out to L.A. to try to do this.’ It was impossible without their support.”
In the biopic Nyad, Bening, 65, plays real-life swimmer Diana Nyad in her attempts to make the daring swim from Cuba to Florida. Reviews of the biopic praised Bening and costar Jodie Foster, who plays Diana’s coach Bonnie Stoll, for bringing Nyad’s story to life.
Now a five-time Oscar nominee, Bening’s last acknowledgment from the Academy came in 2011 for The Kids Are Alright. Throughout the 2024 award season, the actress has received nods at the Globes and the SAG Awards.