Being nominated for an Oscar is often a once-in-a-career achievement. It’s about the right performer in the right role at the right time. For many performers, this is the pinnacle of their careers. For others, it’s another step toward immortality. An Oscar nomination is a way for performers to cement their names among the greatest to have graced the screen. Even more challenging than being nominated is to win. To win is to be at the top of the heap.
Few performers have won even one Oscar. Yet, the race to win again is an even more difficult feat to pull off. With that second win, they cement themselves in an elite club, the upper echelons of acting. Thirty-eight performers have won two acting Oscars. Six performers, Walter Brennan, Frances McDormand, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ingrid Bergman, Jack Nicholson, and Meryl Streep, have gone further and won three Oscars. Only Katharine Hepburn has won four. She is also the second most nominated actor with 12 mentions (Meryl Streep has her beat with 21). Within those 12 nominations and four wins, Hepburn also has the distinction of being one of four performers to win consecutive prizes. Spencer Tracy, Jason Robards, and Tom Hanks are the other performers with that distinction.
Emma Stone could accomplish that feat this awards season with her performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness. In a fierce battle against Lily Gladstone, a heavy favorite last season, Stone came out on top to win her second Best Actress award for Poor Things. In Kinds of Kindness, she plays a trio of complicated women in three distinct segments. Each one of these characters presents its own acting challenge, which has put Stone in the running for her fifth career acting nomination and third win.
Why Stone could win:
- Two of her four acting nominations come from films directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, who directed Kinds of Kindness.
- She has an excellent win percentage with the Academy, winning two of the four times she’s been nominated.
- She gives unselfconscious and daring performances in each of the film’s three segments.
Why Stone could lose:
- A Best Actress nomination for Kinds of Kindness would likely be category fraud as her part in the first segment is minuscule, and her role in the middle chapter is much more of a supporting turn.
- Kinds of Kindness is polarizing and will alienate some awards voters.
- It’s harder to build up a narrative for a third win, especially if the second was the year prior.
- This year’s performance isn’t as strong despite being the same caliber.
It’s so rare to see a performer win consecutive Oscars because it becomes difficult to judge two of their performances on equal footing. It’s even rarer for a performer to have two distinct performances lined up back to back. Katharine Hepburn’s performances from her consecutive wins could not have been more unique. She played a mother concerned with her daughter’s romantic choice in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and a prisoner queen who schemes to get her favorite son on the throne in The Lion in Winter.
Emma Stone’s performances between Poor Things and each of her roles in Kinds of Kindness are distinct from one another, but as a whole, Kinds of Kindness doesn’t highlight how strong of a performer she is. The first segment Stone’s in is little more than a cameo-type role. It is a lynchpin, but it has very little substance to it. The second segment is more of a psychological study, with Stone portraying an internal struggle, which she does quite well, but the story doesn’t linger on her long enough. If anything, her lead performance in the third segment shows she is worthy of recognition. She is devious, vulnerable, unstoppable, and furious in equal measure as a woman out to prove she will be the one to find her cult’s messiah.
If given enough time, Stone may be the next actress to pull off repeat wins. Though many may still see her as the big-eyed ingénue and haven’t come along for the mature turn, her career has taken over the last decade if Katharine Hepburn accomplished the consecutive Oscar feat in her sixties, who’s to say Emma Stone can’t win two in a row in her forties?
