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“I didn’t expect that I would cry the way that I did,” said the actress, who is up for best actress for her role in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
Lily Gladstone shed a few tears when she heard Jack Quaid read her name in the best actress Oscars category on Tuesday morning. “I didn’t expect that I would cry the way that I did,” she said. But it was nothing compared with the reaction of her parents.
“It definitely turned on the waterworks,” said Gladstone, who stars as Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose white husband is part of a murderous conspiracy in the Martin Scorsese epic “Killers of the Flower Moon.” She was calling from Pawhuska, Okla., shortly after watching the Oscar nominations announcement on FaceTime with her parents.
After all, it’s not every day that you’re nominated for your first Oscar — or that you become the first Native American person to be nominated for a competitive acting Academy Award.
“It’s something that I wasn’t sure I would see in my career, in my lifetime,” said Gladstone, 37, who has Blackfeet and Nez Percé heritage. “I hope that it just means that people start caring more and learning more about these histories.”
Gladstone isn’t the first Indigenous artist up for best actress — Keisha Castle-Hughes (“Whale Rider,” 2003) and Yalitza Aparicio (“Roma,” 2018) were also nominated in the same category — but she is the first from the United States. The 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 disputed. And in 2019, Wes Studi, who is Cherokee American, was given an honorary Oscar for “his indelible film portrayals and for his steadfast support of the Native American community.”
Gladstone has had a busy month: On Jan. 7, she became the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, delivering a powerful speech in which she spoke a few lines in the Blackfeet language. She also picked up a best actress win from the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as nominations from the Critics Choice Awards and the Screen Actors Guild.
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