Oscars 2024 Highlights: ‘Oppenheimer’ Wins Best Picture, and Emma Stone Wins Best Actress for ‘Poor Things’

Drawing out his phone onstage, Kimmel decided to share what he called “a review.”

“Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars,” Kimmel said, reading part of Trump’s post, which included a disparaging nickname for the ABC host George Stephanopoulos.

“His opening was that of a less than average person trying too hard to be something which he is not, and never can be,” Kimmel continued. “Get rid of Kimmel and perhaps replace him with another washed up, but cheap, ABC ‘talent,’ George Slopanopoulos. He would make everybody on stage look bigger, stronger, and more glamorous.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Kimmel said. “Make America great again.”

After asking the audience, “See if you can guess which former president just posted that?” Kimmel offered one final jab, expressing surprise that Trump had stayed up to watch the telecast.

“Isn’t it past your jail time?” he said.

“And my eyes see ‘Oppenheimer,’” Pacino said next, to tepid applause from an audience that seemed unsure whether that statement was the most important proclamation of the night.

“Yes, yes,” Pacino, 83, said of the movie that was considered the favorite to win best picture and finished with a night-best seven awards.

At that point, on came the music, and cheers rose from the crowd. The camera cut to Christopher Nolan, the film’s director, and Emma Thomas, one of its producers, as they stood up and made their way to the stage.

Did Jimmy Kimmel see it coming? Just minutes earlier, Kimmel, the host of the ceremony, made a joke about needing to tear up the envelope that said Emma Stone had won best actress for “Poor Things,” an allusion to the epic “Moonlight”/“La La Land” best picture mix-up of 2017.

After the ceremony, Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the academy, said he was pleased with Pacino’s performance. “Everything went beautifully,” Kramer said. “He was just having fun up there.”

Nicole Sperling contributed reporting.

Gladstone played a wealthy Osage woman whose family becomes a target of a murderous plot by white men to steal their oil rights. The actress quickly drew accolades following the premiere of Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour historical epic at the Cannes Film Festival last May.

“You are the soul of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’” said the actress Jennifer Lawrence, as she introduced Gladstone as a nominee on Sunday.

Earlier this year, Gladstone, who has Blackfeet and Nez Percé heritage, became the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, using her moment on the stage to share a snippet of Blackfeet language and remind the industry how far Hollywood had come in representing Native Americans onscreen.

“In this business Native actors used to speak their lines in English and then the sound mixers would run them backwards to accomplish Native languages on camera,” said Gladstone, 37, who also picked up best-actress wins from the Screen Actors Guild and the New York Film Critics Circle.

Other Indigenous performers have won Oscars. The folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie is considered the first, getting best original song for “Up Where We Belong” from “An Officer and a Gentleman” in 1983 (though her Indigenous Canadian heritage has recently been disputed), and Taika Waititi, who is of Maori descent, took home best adapted screenplay for “Jojo Rabbit” (2019). In the best actress category, Indigenous performers like Keisha Castle-Hughes (“Whale Rider,” 2003) and Yalitza Aparicio (“Roma,” 2018) have been in the running for the honor. But among Native Americans, Gladstone is the first to be nominated for that competitive prize. (Wes Studi, who is Cherokee American, received an honorary Oscar in 2019.)

“There’s a handful of people who love film that have been aware of my career for a while, but this has been like being shot out of a cannon,” Gladstone told The New York Times in a profile earlier this year.

In portraying Mollie Burkhart, a real-life figure who survived the Reign of Terror against the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma, Gladstone brought to life the complexities of a woman who was both charmed by the romantic interest of a brash white interloper — played by Leonardo DiCaprio — and deeply suspicious of him. With a performance that could be both emotionally reserved but gutting, Gladstone became the standout in a cast that included two longtime Hollywood fixtures, DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

Gladstone did not follow the typical path of an actor. Instead of moving to Los Angeles or New York to audition in her 20s, she stayed in Montana, touring schools with a one-woman show about the Native American boarding school system and building relationships with local filmmakers. Her career breakthrough came in the 2016 film “Certain Women.”

With “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Gladstone’s talents were given the heft of a big-budget film. She learned to speak Osage with a language teacher and dialect coach, and she consulted with Margie Burkhart, her character’s granddaughter, about her grandparents’ relationship. After Scorsese met in Oklahoma with descendants of the victims, the director worked to deepen the roles of the Osage characters in the script, giving Gladstone access to experts who could advise her on aspects of her performance.

As she has made the media rounds, Gladstone has spoken about the challenges in an industry with few opportunities for Native actors. A recent study found that out of roles in 1,600 films released from 2007 to 2022, speaking parts for Native actors amounted to less than one quarter of 1 percent.

“If I’ve kicked the door in,” Gladstone said in an interview with The New Yorker, “I’m just trying to stand here and leave it open for everybody else.”

Released last summer to glowing reviews and a worldwide box-office total nearing $1 billion, “Oppenheimer” was considered the front-runner even before awards season began. Though some presumed favorites can’t sustain their momentum over several months, “Oppenheimer” never faltered, earning top prizes from the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, BAFTAs and every major Hollywood guild along the way.

And why shouldn’t it have had a charmed run? When it comes to what awards-season voters typically respond to, “Oppenheimer” ticked so many boxes that it could have been designed in an Oscar-friendly Los Alamos lab: It’s a period drama about a great historical figure, set against World War II, directed by a major Hollywood auteur. The cherry on top is that audiences responded to it, too: It’s now the third highest-grossing film to win best picture, behind only “Titanic” and “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.”

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.”

Taking a moment to recognize those in the film industry who have died since the previous Oscars ceremony, the telecast also paid tribute to stars such as Harry Belafonte, the barrier-breaking performer and activist, and Chita Rivera, the Broadway star who also appeared in films, as well as filmmakers such as Norman Jewison, the lauded director behind “In the Heat of the Night,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Moonstruck.”

To accompany the tributes, the superstar tenor Andrea Bocelli sang “Time to Say Goodbye” — with a new orchestration by Hans Zimmer — alongside his son, Matteo Bocelli.

Here are some of figures the Academy honored:

• Alan Arkin, the acclaimed actor who won an Oscar for his role in “Little Miss Sunshine”

• Andre Braugher, a film, TV and theater actor who had roles in Spike Lee and Edward Zwick films

• Michael Gambon, the acclaimed Irish-born actor who played Albus Dumbledore in the “Harry Potter” movies

• William Friedkin, director of the box office hits “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist”

• Bo Goldman, the admired Hollywood screenwriter who took home Oscars for his work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Melvin and Howard”

• Glenda Jackson, the two-time Oscar winner who turned to politics in her 50s

• Piper Laurie, a respected actress with three Oscar nominations, including for her role in “Carrie”

• Bill Lee, a jazz bassist and composer who scored the early films of his son Spike Lee

• Richard Lewis, the acerbic stand-up comic who became a regular in movies and TV

• Ryan O’Neal, who became an instant movie star in the 1970 hit film “Love Story”

• Matthew Perry, the “Friends” star who had roles in movies such as “The Whole Nine Yards”

• Paul Reubens, the comic actor behind Pee-wee Herman who had scores of movie and TV credits

• Richard Roundtree, one of the first Black action heroes who was catapulted to fame in the movie “Shaft”

• Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of Japan’s most prominent composers, who scored the films “The Last Emperor,” “The Sheltering Sky” and “The Revenant”

• Tina Turner, the pop sensation who appeared in films such as “Tommy” and “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”

• Carl Weathers, a former pro linebacker, who played Apollo Creed in the “Rocky” movies

This is Murphy’s first Oscar win and his first nomination. He was a top contender at this year’s Academy Awards after winning a slew of other awards, including best actor at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, best leading actor at the BAFTA Film Awards and best actor in a drama at the Golden Globes.

“It’s been the wildest, most exhilarating, most powerfully satisfying journey you’ve taken me on over the last 20 years,” he said, thanking “Oppenheimer” producer Emma Thomas and director Christopher Nolan, who also won his first Oscar on Sunday night. “I owe you more than I can say.”

The contest for best actor had developed into a two-way race between Murphy and Paul Giamatti (“The Holdovers”), who won best actor at the Critics Choice Awards and best actor in a musical or comedy film at the Golden Globes.

Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”), Colman Domingo (“Rustin”) and Jeffrey Wright (“American Fiction”) were also nominated in the category.

The harrowing first-person account from Chernov, a video journalist for The Associated Press, captures the first days of the Russian invasion and the devastation and destruction the port city of Mariupol faced. “20 Days in Mariupol” is the first Ukrainian film to win an Oscar.

“I wish to be able to exchange this to Russia never attacking Ukraine, never occupying our cities,” Chernov continued. “I wish to give it all the recognition to Russia not killing tens of thousands of my fellow Ukrainians. I wish for them to release all the hostages, all the soldiers who are protecting their lands, all the civilians who are now in their jails.”

Chernov and his crew raced to make it out of Mariupol alive. He said in his speech that he could not change history but wanted it to be remembered.

“We can make sure that the history record is set straight and that the truth will prevail and that the people of Mariupol and those who have given their lives will never be forgotten,” he said.

Many Ukrainians echoed this view on Monday as they celebrated on social media the news that the documentary had won an Oscar. They said seeing the documentary was crucial to truly understanding Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.

“The world saw the truth about Russia’s crimes,” said Andriy Yermak, the head of the presidential office of Ukraine. “Our film broke enemy propaganda.”

In a statement last week before the awards ceremony, President Volodymyr Zelensky said the “horrific and true story” told in the documentary was “crucial to counter Russian lies, to keep Ukraine in the spotlight.”