Emma Stone could break this weird, long-standing Oscar record with ‘Bugonia’
Zach Laws
Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Bugonia.
With two Best Actress trophies on her shelf, Emma Stone is certainly an Oscar favorite, and she looks primed to score yet another nomination this year for Bugonia. If she does, it would truly be an out-of-this-world Oscar bid.
In her latest collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos, Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceutical CEO who is kidnapped by an unstable conspiracy theorist, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), who believes she's an extraterrestrial disguised as a human. Turns out Teddy was right all along, as Michelle returns to her mothership after three days in captivity. Should Stone receive a Best Actress nomination, she'd be the first performer in 41 years to compete at the Oscars for playing an alien.
The first — and so far, only — actor to land an Oscar bid for playing a visitor from another planet was Jeff Bridges in 1984's Starman. Like Stone, Bridges had established himself as a perennial Academy favorite, with Best Supporting Actor noms for 1971's The Last Picture Show and 1974's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot under his belt. So while an acting nomination for a John Carpenter movie feels out of left field, it wasn't for a guy like Bridges, who eventually won the Best Actor prize for 2009's Crazy Heart.
What makes a Stone nomination feel unique is its singularity. To be fair, there have been a number of Oscar-nominated humans traveling through outer space: Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars (although there is a healthy online debate about whether the human-like denizens of Star Wars should be considered homo sapiens or an alien race biologically and anatomically indistinguishable from earthlings), Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Aliens, Matt Damon as Mark Watney in The Martian. There have also been actors who scored bids (Melinda Dillon in Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and even wins (Don Ameche in Cocoon) for films about alien visitors. Yet, when it comes to actors playing aliens in human form, Bridges is the only one.
Part of this has to do with voters' aversion to motion-capture performances (see: Zoe Saldaña in Avatar and Andy Serkis in anything), as well as a general unwillingness to recognize blockbusters outside of the tech categories (Men in Black might have won Best Makeup, but Vincent D'Onofrio was nowhere close to a Best Supporting Actor nomination). There's also the fact that many movie aliens are created through CGI and animatronics, which obviously disqualifies the likes of E.T. from the acting categories.
All of that might not matter for Stone. According to the latest Gold Derby prediction data, she is tracking to score a Best Actress nomination alongside Jessie Buckley (Hamnet), Renata Reinsve (Sentimental Value), Cynthia Erivo (Wicked: For Good), and Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I'd Kick You). Stone has already won that award twice — first for La La Land and again for Lanthimos's Poor Things — and has competed in the supporting actress race for Birdman and The Favourite, the latter also directed by Lanthimos (notice a pattern?). She also has a Best Picture bid under her belt for being a producer on Poor Things, a category she could contend in once again should Bugonia crack the top 10, as it's currently predicted to.
Best Actress
Her nominations milestones aside, what works best in Stone's favor is the decision to keep her character's true identity a secret until the end. Throughout the film, viewers are led to believe that this is all just a figment of Teddy's imagination, and Michelle must convince him otherwise to free herself. It's only in the final moments you realize her denials are actually lies, making Stone's performance more interesting to revisit.
For now, we'll have to wait until Oscar nomination day on Jan. 22 to see if Stone will be beaming up another Academy Award bid.
Don’t you think you should warn readers about spoilers??
Look at the top of the article. There’s a spoiler warning in big, bold letters.
Definitely need a spoiler warning on this. Crazy not to have one
There’s a spoiler alert at the very top of the article.
SPOILERS!
Which is why there’s a spoiler alert included at the top of the article.
When I read this article this morning, there was no warning about SPOILERS! Also, proper etiquette is to put SPOILER in the article title!
There’s a spoiler warning at the top of the article. Has been there since it published.