Oscars 2024: Emma Stone’s Surprise Win at the Critics Choice

When it comes to Best Actress, sex sells. That wasn’t the case last night at the Critics Choice when Emma Stone shocked the audience by winning over the expected winner, Lily Gladstone. But it could be the case barreling into the Oscars. There is just no getting around the basic demo – 75% mostly heterosexual, mostly males.

That’s why women who have lots of sex in movies, at least in the old days, did well. And if they weren’t having sex, they would liven up the red carpet and perhaps showcase their sexuality in a splashy photo spread. Voters would sometimes fall in love with an actress or a performance in a season, like Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love or Kate Winslet in The Reader, Halle Berry in Monsters Ball, Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook.

That has changed in the ensuing years in post-MeToo Hollywood. Frances McDormand won twice, Olivia Colman won, and last year’s Michelle Yeoh won. These wins indicate a different motivator when it comes to Best Actress. The question now is what the motivator will be. What will drive SAG, BAFTA, and, ultimately, Oscar voters? When Olivia Colman shocked by winning both the BAFTA and Oscar, the win had been expected to go to Glenn Close for The Wife.

Other shock wins courtesy of the BAFTA include Anthony Hopkins winning his second Oscar instead of the posthumous win for Chadwick Boseman. Frances McDormand won her third Oscar for Nomadland instead of, say, Viola Davis winning her second in Lead.

There is no doubt that Emma Stone’s performance in Poor Things, as brilliant as it is — and is brilliant — is defined more by all the sex she has throughout, almost on the level of soft-core porn. Obviously this will bother some people more than others. That means it’s divisive in a way that Yorgos Lanthimos movies always are. He delights in all manner of perversion. He likes to show the underbelly or the darker side of human nature, which sometimes is funny and sometimes is traumatizing.

Stone’s performance contrasts dramatically with that of Lily Gladstone, who plays the last surviving member of the family that was the target of multiple murders to steal the head rights from the Osage people. Her trajectory is marked by the scene at the end when they report on her funeral. She died young and there was no mention of the murders. That this story is finally being told is a big deal, not just to the Oscars but to the country, quite frankly. All of that will have to be put aside for the passionate feelings Stone’s performance inspires. And that is our cliffhanger right now. I’m sure there will be others.

The nominations phase is very different from the winning phase. After the nominations come out, the narratives drive the final vote. We have yet to determine what those will be because we do not know how the nominations will land. When the Andrea Riseborough debacle happened, and two Black actresses were absent from the lineup, that put into motion a stronger desire to award Michelle Yeoh, a woman of color who had never before been nominated, over Cate Blanchett — a white woman winning what would have been her third Oscar.

There is now a major celebrity push for Aunjenue Ellis-Taylor by the likes of Angelina Jolie, Frances Fisher, and even Riseborough herself. Can they help push through and earn a spot for Ellis-Taylor? After what we saw last year. And who’s going to complain if a Black actress is nominated? No one. What it might do, though, is cut into support for Lily Gladstone for people looking to make history with their vote. At the moment, that is not knowable.

So, an Ellis-Taylor nomination could possibly tip a Lily Gladstone loss to Emma Stone, but that’s assuming the BAFTA voters will be all-in with Poor Things, and that remains to be seen. The SAG voters opted out of an ensemble nomination or a nod for Mark Ruffalo.  The BAFTA has much enthusiasm for the top five films in contention now:

The acting nominations for the Oscars are looking like this:

Killers: Actress (potential winner), Supporting Actor, maybe Actor.
Oppenheimer: Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor –potential winner
Barbie: Actress, Supporting Actor
Poor Things: Actress, Supporting Actor

I have seen people on Twitter draw the comparison between Anthony Hopkin’s performance in The Father and Chadwick Boseman’s in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom but, in my opinion, the two are not comparable. The Father was a heartbreaker that also got a surprise Best Picture nomination. Poor Things is not The Father. It’s divisive and somewhat controversial, though we don’t yet just how controversial.

Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere, who is advocating hard for Emma Stone’s win, has challenged those of us who cover the Oscars to address this surprise win:

It isn’t that surprising that Stone won the Critics’ Choice, as Film Twitter is over the moon for Poor Things. Whether that holds at the big guilds is a different question.

Things have changed so much since 2020 (“The Great Awokening”) but specifically in the acting categories. In 2020, the BAFTA voters had their rights terminated as a special committee was brought in to “hand-pick” the “right” choices. In the past, the BAFTA has seemed to inspire surprise wins. Some examples include Marion Cotillard winning the BAFTA, then the Oscar, and the favorite (and Critics Choice winner) Julie Christie lost. Cotillard, like Stone. had also won the Golden Globe.

But there have been years where the opposite happened, with Emmanuelle Riva winning the BAFTA and the favorite, Jennifer Lawrence, for Silver Linings Playbook winning instead.

Let’s look at the precedents from 2018, the year Glenn Close lost to Olivia Colman:

You can see how the BAFTA has thrown the Best Actress race topsy-turvy. But it is worth noting that since 2018, only one Critics Choice winner has gone on to win the Oscar, and that’s Jessica Chastain for the Eyes of Tammy Faye, who won the SAG in what was an unpredictable, topsy-turvy year. That puts all eyes on the SAG Awards to decide the winner. Then again, Glenn Close also won the SAG before losing to Olivia Colman.

Ultimately, this race will be decided, I think, by how strongly voters feel about two things. Making history with Lily Gladstone, getting that standing ovation and that wave of love and support from the Osage community, or their passion for Emma Stone’s performance. And that will come down to how much they like these movies. Vibrant, weird and funny vs. deep, reflective, a somber reckoning of our past.

What might also come into play is that Emma Stone has already won an Oscar, whereas Lily Gladstone has yet to be nominated.

I don’t know, friends, it’s a nail-biter.