Emilia Pérez Star Zoe Saldaña Wins First Oscar: “I Am Floored By This Honor”
Zoe Saldaña is officially an Oscar winner! The 46-year-old actress took the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on March 2 to accept the 2025 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Emilia Pérez.
Overwhelmed with emotion, Zoe started her speech by shouting, “Mami! Mami!” and waving at her mother in the audience. Through tears, she said, “My mom is here; my whole family’s here. I am floored by this honor.”
She went on to thank her team, her family, and even gave a sweet mention to her husband Marco Perego and his “beautiful hair.” But the most powerful moment of her speech came when she proudly shared, “I am a proud child of immigrant parents with dreams and dignity and hardworking hands, and I am the first American of Dominican origin to accept an Academy Award. And I know I will not be the last. I hope.”
Zoe’s win was expected after a near-sweep of awards season. She had already claimed Best Supporting Actress trophies at the Golden Globe Awards, Critics Choice Awards, BAFTA Awards, and SAG Awards. Her performance in Emilia Pérez, a Spanish-language musical crime drama, has been widely praised. In the film, she plays Rita, a lawyer tasked with helping a cartel boss undergo gender-affirming surgery to escape their past life.
During her BAFTA acceptance speech on February 16, Zoe dedicated her awards to her nephew Eli, saying, “He is the reason, they are the reason, I signed up to do this film in the first place. So as a proud aunt of a trans life, I will always stand with my community of trans people.”
This year’s Best Supporting Actress category featured fierce competition. Also nominated were Monica Barbaro for A Complete Unknown, Ariana Grande for Wicked, Felicity Jones for The Brutalist, and Isabella Rossellini for Conclave.
Monica, 34, played folk legend Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown, starring alongside Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. The biopic received a total of eight nominations, including Best Picture. Reflecting on her career, Monica told PEOPLE, “The probability of even getting to [act] for a living is just really low, and so I constantly just try to remind myself of that. I haven’t wrapped my head around it.”
Meanwhile, Ariana entered the Oscars with Wicked, which tied The Brutalist with 10 nominations, making it one of the most celebrated films of the night. The 31-year-old singer-turned-actress had already been recognized for her performance as Glinda at the BAFTAs, Critics Choice Awards, Golden Globes, and SAG Awards. In a December 2024 interview with Variety, Ariana hinted that acting is her current focus, saying, “The next few years, hopefully, we’ll be exploring different forms of art, and I think acting is feeling like home right now.”
Felicity Jones, 41, returned to the Oscars for her role in The Brutalist, where she portrayed Erzsébet Tóth, a Holocaust survivor building a new life in the U.S. in the 1950s. She had previously been nominated for Best Actress at the 2015 Oscars for The Theory of Everything. Speaking about the film’s success, she shared, “It’s just been a fantastic celebration of the film…You don’t get this many opportunities. So I am trying to enjoy every minute of it.”
Legendary actress Isabella Rossellini, 72, earned her first-ever Oscar nomination for her role as Sister Agnes in Conclave, a drama centered on the Vatican’s selection of a new pope. Ralph Fiennes, who played Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, was also nominated for his performance. Isabella had already received nods at the Critics Choice Awards and BAFTA Awards, marking a well-deserved recognition for her decades-long career.
