In this op-ed, writer Angie Jaime discusses why Lily Gladstone’s award season run can’t be the end of native representation.
Martin Scorsese is pulling Lily Gladstone in for a hug as the Oscars audience mills about after the show concludes. While the footage posted by The Hollywood Reporter senior staff writer Chris Gardner is largely inaudible, we see Scorsese counting off with his fingers to Gladstone, perhaps offering some comfort by counting off the number of Oscar nominations he’s received in his storied career (eleven), in relation to the number of his wins (just one).
Killers of the Flower Moon, the film directed by Scorsese, starring Gladstone made history both for its awards season dominating, nuanced depiction of the Osage Nation and for garnering a Best Actress nomination at this year’s Oscars. Still, the film took home no awards last night, despite ten nominations.
It’s a comforting scene just moments after her loss to best actress winner Emma Stone, where fears were already swirling elsewhere online that losing the award could spell dwindling interest for Gladstone’s rising star. Scorsese’s presence alongside her at the awards show, is a testament to a career that stands in contrast to definitions of “success” as marked by awards. So too will Gladstone’s career mark a sea-change in Native representation within Hollywood.
“At the after-parties, many pundits said Lily Gladstone should've gone supporting. But there's more to a film career than winning an Oscar. By going lead, Lily told Hollywood to treat her like a lead. And she just booked another lead, which many supporting winners struggle to do,” Kyle Buchanan, pop culture reporter and awards season columnist for The New York Times, posted on X the morning after the Oscars.
Indeed, the notion that actresses of color may be more likely to win if positioned as a supporting role to a white lead has been discussed over the years. To date, the best actress award has been presented a total of 96 times and has been awarded to women of color only twice. Halle Berry remains the only Black woman to have triumphed in the lead category, for her role in 2001’s Monster’s Ball. Michelle Yeoh joined her in receiving this honor, becoming the first Asian woman to win a best actress Oscar for her 2023 performance in the multiversal Everything Everywhere All at Once. Lily Gladstone is only the second Indigenous actor to receive the nomination for best actress in the Oscars long history, following Yalitza Aparicio’s nomination for her turn in Roma. It’s worth noting, however, that Aparicio has yet to book another lead acting role in a feature film.
“In short, proper industry appreciation for Indigenous storytelling is long overdue — we’re talking nearly a century of Oscars with a pretty pitiful track record. But with her historic awards season run, Gladstone is changing that,” Kate Nelson wrote in Teen Vogue, describing the impact that her Hollywood recognition for Flower Moon has made among Indigenous audiences.
Gladstone stars in the upcoming Fancy Dance which will be available to stream on Apple TV+, along with Killers of the Flower Moon. Fancy Dance was a Sundance Film Festival selection and marks the feature directorial debut for Seneca-Cayuga filmmaker Erica Tremblay, who also co-wrote and produced the film. Notably, Gladstone and Tremblay worked on the groundbreaking show Reservation Dogs, Gladstone as an actor and Tremblay as both a writer and director, and previously collaborated as star and writer-director in the short film, Little Chief.
Scorsese and Gladstone will team up again with the upcoming Charlie Kaufman adaptation of The Memory Police, which Scorsese is set to executive produce. Gladstone’s booked and busy schedule will continue with runs in a Morrisa Maltz-directed feature Jazzy, which Gladstone co-wrote and will star in, as well as starring in a limited series for Hulu, Under the Bridge. With shows like Reservation Dogs, Echo and True Detective garnering buzz and more Native-led projects in the pipeline, Gladstone’s historic nomination and awards season run will not be the end of her story, nor will Native representation at a global scale, end with her Oscars snub.
“While I’m the first specifically Native American Indigenous woman, I stand on the shoulders of a lot of performers,” Gladstone told The New Yorker. “It’s all circumstantial that I have this moniker of the first, and I’m certainly not going to be the last. If I’ve kicked the door in, I’m just trying to stand here and leave it open for everybody else.”
In the face of staggering historical context, contemporary Native American and Indigenous filmmakers and artists have not, nor will they abandon efforts to correct a century and more of deeply flawed storytelling. And truly, visual sovereignty for Indigenous peoples has never been more important. And with increasing presence in the entertainment industry, the call to craft self-made stories that have the potential to erode the very stereotypes of Indigenous peoples that Hollywood helped to build in the first place is a cultural imperative.
