Lily Gladstone, who quickly rose to Hollywood stardom with her powerful performance in Killers of the Flower Moon, ended a career-defining awards season with the Academy Awards, becoming the first Native American to act. It was nominated for the prestigious Academy Award. award.
Gladstone played a wealthy Osage woman whose family becomes the target of a murder plot by a white man stealing oil interests. She quickly garnered praise after Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour historical epic premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last May.
“You are the soul of Killers of the Flower Moon,” actress Jennifer Lawrence said Sunday while introducing Gladstone as a nominee.
Earlier this year, Gladstone, who is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce descent, used a moment on stage to share a snippet of Blackfeet language and remind the industry how far Hollywood has come. For this reason, she became the first indigenous person to win the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. In representing Native Americans on screen.
“In this industry, native actors would speak their lines in English, and then a sound mixer would play them backwards to represent their native language on camera,” according to the Screen Actors Guild and Screen Actors Guild. said Gladstone, 37, who won Best Actress. New York Film Critics Circle.
Other Indigenous performers have also won Oscars. Folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie is thought to be the first, winning Best Original Song in 1983 for “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman (although she was an Indigenous Canadian). There has been some controversy recently about this). The Maori actor won the Best Original Screenplay award for Jojo Rabbit (2019). In the Best Actress category, indigenous actors such as Keisha Castle-Hughes (Whale Rider, 2003) and Yalitza Aparicio (Roma, 2018) are nominated. However, Gladstone is the first Native American to be nominated for the competitive award. (Wes Study, a Cherokee American, received an honorary Oscar in 2019.)
“There are a few moviegoers who had known about my career for some time, but this was like being shot out of a cannon,” Gladstone told The New York Times in a profile earlier this year.
Gladstone plays Molly Burkhart, a real-life person who survived a reign of terror against the Osage Nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s, a woman who is also attracted to the romantic interest of Leonardo’s brash white interloper. brought to life the complexity of DiCaprio — and deeply suspicious of him. Gladstone’s emotionally restrained but gut-wrenching performance made him stand out from a long-running Hollywood cast that included DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.
Gladstone didn’t follow the typical acting path. In her 20s, instead of moving to Los Angeles or New York to audition, she stayed in Montana, where she toured schools in a one-woman play about the Native American boarding school system and appeared in local films. Developed relationships with producers. Her career breakthrough came with the 2016 film “Certain Women.”
Killers of the Flower Moon gave Gladstone’s talents the weight of a big-budget movie. She learned Osage from a language teacher and dialect coach, and consulted the character’s granddaughter, Margie Burkhart, about her grandparents’ relationship. After director Scorsese met with descendants of the victims in Oklahoma, the director worked to deepen the role of the Osage characters in the script and gave Gladstone access to experts who could advise him on aspects of the performance. .
During his media rounds, Gladstone spoke about the challenges of an industry that lacks opportunities for Native actors. A recent study found that out of 1,600 movie roles released from 2007 to 2022, less than a quarter of the roles had Native actors speaking their lines.
Gladstone said in an interview with The New Yorker, “If I kicked down the door, I just want to stand here and hold the door open for other people.”
