Aaron Poole / ©A.M.P.A.S.; Getty ImagesWhat is an award season without Jennifer Lawrence? What is a red carpet without her highly-anticipated dress reveals, her bubbly effervescence in interviews, her falls on the way into the theater? What is a show without her accidentally saying something off-script, yet totally relatable? What is Oscar campaign season without her many, many talk show appearances, waxing poetic on throw-up stories?
This year, we found out.
2017's award season was fully devoid of Lawrence. She was completely absent from the entire thing, receiving neither nominations nor invitations to present. This wasn't anything personal, of course, but just a matter of schedule. For one, she wasn't actually in a contender movie this year, as Passengers was, well, Passengers. And she has spent most of the first quarter of the year filming in various far-flung Eastern European cities like Budapest. It was expected that she wouldn't make any appearances, but that didn't keep most fans (and we here at E! News) from hoping that she might pop us a surprise at at least one of the award shows.
But she didn't, and the public was left to wonder just what they would do without JLaw's very specific brand of zany humility. But then Emma Stone stepped up big time.
It's always been clear that Stone is slightly Lawrencian in her manner. They're both extremely talented and funny and gorgeous and all that, but the same could be said for everyone we admire in Hollywood. Being pretty and also funny isn't a rarity—for women, at least. Men in Hollywood, well, you might be lagging behind a little. But we digress: There's something so specific that Jennifer brings to award season, and the fact that we found those same warm and fuzzy feelings in Emma was a welcome surprise.
They both seem to know that they're not curing cancer here: Jen's last Oscar was for a biopic about mops, and Emma was representing a kicky movie about jazz music. Compared to the more visceral and necessary stories told and exposed by the likes of their counterparts (cough, Viola Davis and Naomie Harris, to name a few), a healthy dose of perspective is welcome.
But in an award season rife with serious matter and stars who inspire us all, we can also really appreciate watching someone we really, really want to get a beer with. That was JLaw, and now, it seems it might be Emma, too.
To start with the obvious point of comparison, Stone cleaned house. She was nominated for her role in La La Land all across the board, winning both the Golden Globe and the Oscar—in 2013 Lawrence won both for her work in Silver Linings Playbook, and in 2014 and 2016 she won the Globe and received an Oscar nom for American Hustle and Joy, respectively. This multiplied her visibility tenfold, giving her many more interview opportunities and, as such, many more opportunities to flesh her Lawrencian muscles.
Stone is adorably uncomfortable. We'll never stop being in awe of the style and grace of the aforementioned Davis, especially when she's on the Oscars stage, but we also understand that it's a quality that grows over time. No one under the age of 30 can possibly have the emotional capacity to be even half as poised as Viola Davis, and that's just a fact.
But we appreciate seeing the fault lines in younger actresses. Witnessing Stone, just like Jen before her, be a little weirded out and a little awkward about all of this celebrity stuff, and all of this winning-the-biggest-award-in-Hollywood stuff makes her more human. She's still composed as all get out, but she also gives off nervous laughter and lets us in on her discomfort.
She shoots from the hip. JLaw is practically as famous for her potty mouth as she is for her acting chops; it's presumably the first thing that she and recent bestie Amy Schumer bonded over. Emma is quite as sailor-esque in her language, but she's also wonderfully filter-less. Case in point: Her press room appearances during the 2017 Oscar season.
The most notable was, of course, her stint at this Sunday's Oscars, fresh off that horribly awkward Best Picture mix-up. She couldn't hide her shock, gracing the stage as she exclaimed, "Craziest thing ever?!" She also let one slip when she told the room of reporters, "I f--king love Moonlight." Jen would be proud.
Her fashion is on point. This is kind of a duh, but one of the things we look forward to with Lawrence's award season antics are her mastery of the classic gown. When she walks onto a red carpet, she's dressed like a winner. Well, Emma saw her Dior hand and raised her one winners dress for the history books.
The actress knocked it out of the park at every show this year, but her Academy Awards dress seemed tailor made to accept the Best Actress statue. From the shiny gold material to her old-Hollywood hair, all of it said, These pictures will be the stuff of legends.
She has an onscreen BFF that we're all obsessed with. To compare Bradley Cooper and Ryan Gosling is to compare a really hot apple to a really hot orange. But what we all feel inside when we watch Cooper and Lawrence is the same warm fuzzy sensation that tingles upon a glance at Gosling and Stone. They're serial costars who are also now serial friends. They're platonically, head-over-heels in friend-love.
Mishaps just seem to gravitate to her. Jennifer Lawrence isn't a clumsy person, but clumsiness just happens to her. She attracts embarrassing moments like a moth to a GIF-able flame, and we've now come to expect these viral moments whenever she makes an appearance. After award season 2017, it seems that Emma suffers from the same non-ailment.
There was, of course, that littlest of mishaps at the end of the Oscars. As Stone stood onstage while the producers tried frantically to right one of the most unforgivable wrongs in Academy Awards history, she most definitely wanted to discover a secret trap door in the floor or a a jetpack waiting to shoot her out of the place. Instead, she did what we would all do: Froze, mouth agape, mouthing "Oh my god."
Slightly less traumatizing than tripping on the way to accept your award, but no less embarrassing, was her now-infamous three-way hug with La La Land director Damien Chazelle and his girlfriend. Much like what presumably went through Jen's head as she felt herself falling up those stairs, Emma was surely wondering what she had done to deserve this moment now enshrined in Golden Globes history.
But sometimes bad hugs happen to good people. We're just glad that person was Emma.