Lily Gladstone, star of Martin Scorsese's epic “Killers of the Flower Moon,” was nominated Tuesday for the best actress Oscar, making her the first Native American person to compete for a competitive acting Academy Award. In the film, she plays Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose white husband is part of a murderous conspiracy.
Gladstone, 37, who has Blackfeet and Nez Percé heritage, is not the first Indigenous artist to earn a best actress nomination: Keisha Castle-Hughes (“Whale Rider,” 2003) and Yalitza Aparicio (“Roma,” 2018 ) were also nominated in the same category, but it is the first from the United States. Folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie is considered the first indigenous person to win an Oscar (for best song, “Up Where We Belong” from “An Officer and a Gentleman,” in 1983), but her heritage has recently been questioned. she. And in 2019, Wes Studi, a Cherokee American, received an honorary Oscar for “her indelible cinematic portrayals of him and his steadfast support of the Native American community.”
Gladstone has had a busy first month of 2024: On January 7, she became the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, giving a powerful speech in which she delivered a few lines in the Blackfeet language. She also earned the New York Film Critics Circle Best Actress Award, as well as nominations from the Critics Choice Awards and the Screen Actors Guild.
“Killers,” based on a nonfiction book by David Grann, was re-conceived from the beginning to focus on the relationship between Mollie and her husband, Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), who conspires with his uncle (Robert De Niro) to kill his relatives in an attempt to seize his family's oil-rich land in Oklahoma.
Since the film's release in October, critics have singled out Gladstone for her “magnetic” and grounded performance (Anthony Lane, writing in The New Yorker, heralded her as “easily the film's most compelling presence.”) . The New York Times' chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, praised his chemistry with DiCaprio, which she said was anchored in the contrast between the reserved and physically demonstrative acting styles of Mollie and Ernest.
“You believe in these characters but also, fundamentally, you believe in them as a couple and in the tenderness of their love,” Dargis wrote in his review of the film, which he called a “heartbreaking masterpiece.”
Gladstone grew up performing in plays put on by a traveling children's theater on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana. She landed a breakthrough role in Kelly Reichardt's 2016 independent film, “Certain Women,” which raised her profile considerably, but “Killers,” with its $200 million budget and A-list cast, catapulted her to the upper echelon. top of Hollywood.
