BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 28 of 150

Correct — B, Poor Things. At the 96th Academy Awards, held on 10 March 2024 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles and hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, Emma Stone won Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for playing Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things. It was her second Best Actress Oscar. Poor Things was the second most decorated film of that night, taking four awards — Actress in a Leading Role, Production Design, Costume Design, and Makeup and Hairstyling — behind Oppenheimer, which converted a leading 13 nominations into seven wins including Best Picture, Best Director for Christopher Nolan, Best Actor for Cillian Murphy and Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr. Stone was on the 96th ballot twice over, because she was also a producer of Poor Things and so carried a share of its Best Picture nomination. Now the part that decides the question. All three named films are genuine Emma Stone films, and two of them did take her to the Oscar podium — which is precisely the trap. The stem pins down three things simultaneously: the 96th ceremony, the Leading Role category, and a win. La La Land satisfies the category and the win but belongs to the 89th Academy Awards, held on 26 February 2017 for the films of 2016. The Favourite (2018) produced a nomination in the Supporting Actress category and no win at all. Only Poor Things satisfies all three conditions at once, so option (d) 'More than one of the above' cannot stand: a single ceremony awards the Leading Actress Oscar to exactly one performance.

• (a)La La Land — The single most attractive wrong answer, because it is half right. Emma Stone did win Best Actress for La La Land — but at the 89th Academy Awards on 26 February 2017, honouring the films of 2016. La La Land took six awards from a record-tying 14 nominations that night, and the ceremony is remembered for the envelope error that briefly gave it Best Picture before Moonlight was corrected in as the actual winner. Right actress, right category, wrong ceremony by seven years.
• (c)The Favourite — A 2018 period comedy and Stone's first collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos, in which she played Abigail Hill. It brought her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress — not Best Actress, and not a win. Candidates who remember only that 'Emma Stone and Lanthimos won an Oscar together' reach for the earlier and more talked-about of the two films and lose the mark on the category as well as the ceremony.
• (d)More than one of the above — This would need two of the three films to have won her the Leading Role Oscar at the 96th ceremony, which is structurally impossible — one ceremony, one Best Actress. La La Land's win belongs to the 89th ceremony and The Favourite produced no win at all. BPSC's fourth option is a live answer often enough on this very paper (it is the key for Q13, Q21 and Q30) that candidates are trained to over-select it; here it is a pure decoy.

The Academy Awards are conferred annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, first presented on 16 May 1929, and they honour films of the preceding calendar year. That one-year offset is the source of nearly every dating mistake candidates make: the 96th ceremony took place in March 2024 but rewarded the films of 2023, the 95th took place in March 2023 for the films of 2022, and so on, so the ordinal number and the release year are always one apart. Acting honours are split into four awards — Actor and Actress in a Leading Role, and Actor and Actress in a Supporting Role — and the leading/supporting distinction is decided by how the studio campaigns the performance, not by screen time, which is why the same performer can appear in one category one year and the other the next. BPSC used the Academy's own formal wording, 'Actress in a Leading Role', rather than the popular shorthand 'Best Actress', and that formality is a hint that the examiner is reading from the official winners list. India's presence at the 96th was one nomination: To Kill a Tiger, a 2022 Hindi-language Canadian documentary directed by Nisha Pahuja about a family in Jharkhand fighting for justice after their teenage daughter was raped, was nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film. It did not win.

Reason to this answer in two moves, and you never have to recall the winner's name at all. Move one: convert the ordinal into a film year. The 96th Academy Awards honour the films of 2023, so the correct answer must be a 2023 release. Of the three named films, La La Land is 2016 and The Favourite is 2018; only Poor Things is a 2023 film. That single arithmetic step eliminates two options before any memory of the ceremony is required, and it is the most reliable discriminator on the whole item. Move two, as a cross-check: apply the category filter. La La Land did produce a Best Actress win, but The Favourite produced only a Supporting Actress nomination, so even a candidate who confuses the ceremonies can rule out option (c) on category alone. The trap here is a well-informed one, not an ignorant one — a candidate who knows Emma Stone has two Best Actress Oscars reaches for the more famous first one, because La La Land is the film that made her a household name in India. The second trap is the fourth option. BPSC keys 'More than one of the above' correct frequently on this paper, so candidates who see two plausible films start reaching for (d); but a Leading Actress Oscar at a single ceremony is by construction a one-film award, and under the paper's minus-one-third marking that reflex costs 0.33 marks.

• 96th Academy Awards: 10 March 2024, Dolby Theatre, Hollywood, Los Angeles; host Jimmy Kimmel; Best Picture went to Oppenheimer, which won 7 awards from a leading 13 nominations, including Best Director for Christopher Nolan and Best Actor for Cillian Murphy.
• Emma Stone won Actress in a Leading Role for Bella Baxter in Poor Things (2023), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos; the film took four Oscars in all — Actress in a Leading Role, Production Design, Costume Design, and Makeup and Hairstyling.
• It was Stone's second Best Actress Oscar. Her first was for La La Land at the 89th Academy Awards on 26 February 2017, a night on which La La Land won six awards from 14 nominations while Best Picture went to Moonlight.
• The Favourite (2018), Stone's first film with Yorgos Lanthimos, earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination and no win — a different category and a different outcome from the one the stem describes.
• India at the 96th: To Kill a Tiger, directed by Nisha Pahuja and set among a family in Jharkhand, was nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film. At the 95th Academy Awards on 12 March 2023 India had won twice — 'Naatu Naatu' from RRR (music M. M. Keeravani, lyrics Chandrabose) for Best Original Song, and The Elephant Whisperers for Best Documentary Short Film.

• Reading the ordinal as the film year — the 96th ceremony was held in 2024 but honoured films released in 2023
• Remembering that Emma Stone has two Best Actress Oscars and reaching for the earlier, more famous La La Land win, which belongs to the 89th ceremony in 2017
• Over-selecting 'More than one of the above' because BPSC keys it correct so often on this paper — a single ceremony can award the Leading Actress Oscar to only one performance

BPSC asks awards as flat single-fact recall pinned to a numbered edition — '96th Academy Awards (2024)', '70th National Film Award', 'Ramon Magsaysay Award 2024' — and then hangs 'More than one of the above' off the end, so the edition number and the year are effectively the whole question. UPSC has not asked a bare Oscar winner since the 2000s. When it did touch the Academy Awards in 2006 it asked who directed India's official entry rather than who won, and its modern awards questions test institutional structure instead: who confers the honour, under which statute, and whether it is a 'title' barred by Article 18(1), as in its 2021 item on the Bharat Ratna and Padma Awards.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  At the 96th Academy Awards (2024), which film won the Oscar for Best Picture ?

  • (a)Poor Things
  • (b)Oppenheimer
  • (c)The Zone of Interest
  • (d)Barbie

  Answer(b) Oppenheimer — Christopher Nolan's film led the field with 13 nominations and converted seven of them, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Cillian Murphy. Poor Things won four awards that night but not Best Picture.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Emma Stone won her FIRST Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in which film ?

  • (a)Birdman
  • (b)The Favourite
  • (c)La La Land
  • (d)Battle of the Sexes

  Answer(c) La La Land — she won Best Actress for it at the 89th Academy Awards on 26 February 2017. Birdman (2014) and The Favourite (2018) brought her Best Supporting Actress nominations only, and Battle of the Sexes (2017) brought none of the four acting Oscars.