“Oh, boy.” Those were the first words of Emma Stone’s acceptance speech upon winning Best Actress at Sunday night’s Academy Awards for her performance in Poor Things. Receiving an Oscar must be overwhelming no matter the circumstances, and as Stone would go on to share, she was also accepting the award while wearing a dress with a split-open back. But that “oh, boy” was also an acknowledgement that winning the award had put her in a decidedly tricky position.
Going into the awards, many Oscar analysts had favored Lily Gladstone, who was nominated for her work in Killers of the Flower Moon, though Stone was very much in contention too. Both performances earned heaps of praise from critics, but many people thought Gladstone had the stronger narrative on her side: Whereas Stone, who is white, already has an Oscar (for 2016’s La La Land), a Gladstone win would have been historic, marking the first acting Oscar ever for a Native American. History will have to wait at least another year.
It would be unfair to reduce both performances to the actors’ race, and there are a lot of ways one might explain Stone’s win. Even still, Stone knew she was in a weird position—not least because of the parallels between the real-life events of awards season and what goes on in Stone’s other major role from last year, the Showtime series The Curse. In the show, Stone plays a wannabe HGTV star who builds expensive, garish sustainable houses in a modest New Mexico town and is convinced she can rebrand gentrification into a positive thing. Stone’s character, Whitney, has a particularly uncomfortable relationship with a Native American woman, an artist she ends up essentially paying to be her friend. The clueless, self-congratulatory treatment of other races by white people is a major theme of the show, and it sometimes felt like it had a meta layer given some of the past choices earlier in Stone’s career, such as starring in the white-savior movie The Help and signing on to play a multiracial character of Asian, Swedish, and Hawaiian descent in Aloha.
By starring in The Curse, Stone is definitely someone who’s thought about this, and she had clearly thought at least a little bit about what it would mean for her to win an Oscar over Gladstone. But in addition to thinking about it in her capacity as an intelligent, curious person, she would also be naïve if she didn’t think about what it could mean for her image. Winning an acting award (any award, but especially an acting one) ironically involves putting on another performance. Actors have to worry about how to arrange their faces when the winner is announced, so they seem gracious even if they’re pissed or they seem surprised even though they knew it was coming. In this case, Stone faced those usual pressures plus an additional layer.
Stone won a few of the precursor awards, and many pundits agreed she had a good shot, so her win didn’t come out of nowhere, but it still qualified as the surprise of the night. Stone herself looked almost shellshocked when she won, and a little uncomfortable. She reportedly told a journalist earlier that night that she thought there was no way she was winning. That seems a little ridiculous, given that she’d already won a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for the performance. I’m not saying she was lying; maybe she convinced herself she had no chance. But I’d have a hard time believing she didn’t at least have a conversation with her publicist about how to handle it if she won. What are publicists for if not that?
Stone had a few clear examples of what not to do. Over the past decade or so, there’ve been lots of conversation about the whiteness of the Oscars and other awards shows, and while there’s been some progress, institutional racism also persists. Occasionally, white artists who benefit from it have created minor public relations disasters for themselves in their clumsy attempts to call it out. After Macklemore won Best Rap Album over Kendrick Lamar at the 2014 Grammys, he texted Lamar, “You got robbed. I wanted you to win. You should have. It’s weird and sucks that I robbed you.” We know this because he also shared a screenshot of the text publicly, an act that seemed to lead to more mocking and eye-rolling than anything else. A few years later, in 2017, when Adele won the Album of the Year Grammy over Beyoncé, Adele was well-meaning but awkward as she talked about how much Beyoncé meant to her and her Black friends. The opportunities to say the wrong thing in such a situation are many.
Stone’s game-time decision on how to play it seemed to be to own her moment, with a little hand-wringing, but not an excessive amount. At no point does she put her foot in her mouth. If you watch the speech she gave upon winning her first Oscar, she hits many of the same beats in this one, including thanking her fellow nominees by name. But she also seems more frazzled this time, saying at one point, “I don’t know what I’m saying.” She said she’d thought about this moment and been reminded it was not about her but everyone involved in Poor Things. We may never know if she was normal-frazzled or frazzled because she was afraid the whole internet would be mad at her for “taking the Oscar away” from Lily Gladstone. Either way, she pulled it off, and she can rest assured: Most people seem to agree she’s not the villain here. The academy, however, still has some explaining to do.
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