Lily Gladstone Becomes the First Native American Nominated for a Best Actress Oscar

Lily Gladstone, a star of the Martin Scorsese epic “Killers of the Flower Moon,” was nominated for the best actress Oscar on Tuesday, making her the first Native American person to contend 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, isn’t 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 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 first month of 2024: 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.

“Killers,” based on a nonfiction book by David Grann, was reconceived early on to focus on the relationship between Mollie and her husband, Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), who conspires with his uncle (Robert De Niro) to kill her relatives in a bid to seize her family’s oil-rich Oklahoma land.

Since the film was released in October, critics have singled out Gladstone for her grounded, “magnetic” performance (Anthony Lane, writing in The New Yorker, heralded her as “unmistakably the movie’s most compelling presence”). The New York Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, praised her chemistry with DiCaprio, which she wrote was anchored by the contrast between Mollie and Ernest’s reserved and physically demonstrative performance styles.

“You believe in these characters but also, crucially, you believe them as a couple and in the tenderness of their love,” Dargis wrote in her review of the film, which she called a “heartbreaking masterpiece.”

Gladstone grew up acting in plays staged by a traveling children’s theater on the Blackfeet reservation in northwestern Montana. She landed a breakthrough role in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 indie, “Certain Women,” that raised her profile considerably, but “Killers,” with its reported $200 million budget and A-list cast, vaulted her into Hollywood’s highest echelon.