Why Emma Stone Says the Best Part of Winning Her First Oscar Was Leonardo DiCaprio
The Poor Things actress lived every Titanic fan's dream at the 2017 Academy Awards.
These days Emma Stone might be a five-time Host of Saturday Night Live and an Oscar-winning actress. But in the '90s, she was like any other preteen girl: In love with Jack Dawson from Titanic.
Which made the night she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2017 even more surreal because it was Leonardo DiCaprio, who played Jack, who handed her the Oscar onstage. Stone took home her first Best Actress Oscar for La La Land, and in 2024 she's nominated again for her portrayal of Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things.
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When Stone visited The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon back in November 2018, she reflected on how intense the La La Land awards season was, and why sharing a stage with her teen crush was the best part of the evening.
"The Academy Awards had to have been a rush. That was nuts," Host Jimmy Fallon asked Stone during their interview.
"That was surreal. That I don't really remember that well. It's just so crazy. It seems impossible. It probably is impossible but something weird happened. I really just remember being with my brother," she said, referring to her brother Spencer, who was her Oscars date.
"Do you remember getting handed the Academy Award?" Fallon asked the four-time Oscar nominee.
Emma Stone talks to Jimmy Fallon about the night she won her first Oscar
"I'd seen that movie so many times, and I had a framed photo of him in my room when I was a kid that was signed by him," The Curse actress said of her childhood crush turned colleague. "Just walking up there and getting to be near him was really exciting."
Don't get Stone wrong; the award itself was an enormous honor. "It sounds like everything other than the thing itself was the best part, but that's not what I mean," Stone told Fallon. "I'm very grateful. It was really fun, the whole thing."
DiCaprio even gave her a kiss when she accepted the Oscar.
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"What do you do with the Academy Award? Can you have it out? Is it weird to have it in your house," asked The Tonight Show Host.
"My mom has it. I mean, what am I going to do with it?" answered Stone. Maybe place it next to her signed picture of DiCaprio?
