A PowerPoint presentation has never looked so good! After a long journey from Scottsdale, Arizona to Hollywood, Oscar darling Emma Stone finally fulfilled her lifelong dream of Oscar glory.
At the 89th Academy Awards, La La Land leading lady, Emma Stone, took home one of the biggest awards of the night cementing herself as the Best Actress of the year.
Frontrunner all awards season long, the actress took to the stage to make a charming and humble acceptance speech. "I still have a lot of growing and learning and work to do," she finished, "and this guy is a really beautiful symbol to continue on that journey and I'm so grateful for that. So thank you so much, thank you."
The newly minted Oscar winner told The Hollywood Reporter, ""I had this Howard Beale-like moment," when she was sitting in a ninth grade history class, "It's the last period of the day, and I have a revelation that I needed to move to Los Angeles as soon as possible because that's where I needed to go. I know, it was crazy."
Stone then raced home to put together a presentation entitled "Project Hollywood," to convince her parents to let her go to Los Angeles. "It's nuts that they agreed to it. I don't condone it. Everybody should go through high school and graduate."
The Crazy, Stupid, Love actress has been very open about her struggles with anxiety going back to her childhood. “I was just kind of immobilized by it," she tells Vogue. "I didn’t want to go to my friends’ houses or hang out with anybody, and nobody really understood.” That is until she found comfort in theater, “It gave me a sense of purpose. I wanted to make people laugh. Comedy was my sport. It taught me how to roll with the punches. Failure is the exact same as success when it comes to comedy because it just keeps coming. It never stops.”
After making the move to LA, Stone's career started off slowly, mirroring her character's from La La Land. Eventually, she earned a small role in Malcolm in the Middle, before landing her big break opposite Jonah Hill in Superbad. While her screen time was minimal, she made the most of it.
Superbad opened doors for Stone to appear in movies like The House Bunny, Zombieland, and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, before she landed her starring role in hit film Easy A. The role caused her to become overwhelmed with her stardom and move 3,000 miles away to New York, “Losing my anonymity after Easy A, it was like being 7 years old all over again. It terrified me.”
Stone's career has been growing ever since, starring in The Amazing Spiderman franchise, securing her and Ryan Gosling's spot as one of the best big screen couples in history and earning a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her work in Birdman before taking home the statue in 2017.
Here's to the ones who dream. Congratulations Emma!