Last year’s Oscar for best actress went to a universe-hopping laundromat owner who at one point appears to have hot dogs for fingers. Naturally, this year had to go even stranger.
The award went to Emma Stone for her performance in the Yorgos Lanthimos-directed “Poor Things” as Bella Baxter, once dead but resurrected by a mad scientist, who implanted the brain of her unborn child into her skull.
The result is a full-grown woman with the impulses of an infant, until she progresses into a child testing boundaries and searching for independence in a world where men are accustomed to dictating women’s lives.
Stone, who was visibly overwhelmed in her acceptance speech, shared a conversation she had with Lanthimos, who is a frequent collaborator.
“The other night I was panicking, as you can kind of see happens a lot, that maybe something like this could happen,” she said, “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.”
The victory is Stone’s second for best actress: she won for her turn as a striving Hollywood performer in the 2016 musical “La La Land.”
In the fantastical, absurdist world of “Poor Things,” Stone’s Bella Baxter is charmingly blunt, brash and intent on being free to experiment. In one memorable scene at a restaurant in Portugal, Baxter launches into a wild and silly dance, inspiring her lover (played by Mark Ruffalo) to furiously try matching her vigor.
“She’s drinking up the world around her in such a unique and beautiful way that I just dream I could,” Stone, 35, said in an interview with The Times in November.
This past year was something of a crossroads for Stone’s career as she made a sharp turn away from the kind of mainstream roles that made her famous (“Easy A,” “The Help”). On TV, Stone starred alongside Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie in “The Curse,” a satire of a home renovation show filled with little absurdities that almost rival the duck-headed bulldog in “Poor Things.”
Baxter’s unusual character arc provided Stone a unique actor’s playground as her character learned how to walk and talk, discovered her sexuality, learned the deepest horrors of humanity, and sought to forge her own life as an adult.
“I felt like I kind of lived with her for a long time,” Stone told Vanity Fair. “Yorgos and I still talk about how we miss her now.”
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
