Lily Gladstone says Oscars loss for Killers of the Flower Moon was ‘irrelevant’

Lily Gladstone is not sweating her controversial Best Actress loss at the 2024 Oscars, saying that it’s “irrelevant whether or not I walked home with that statue in hand”.

The Killers of the Flower Moon star, 37, made history as the first Native American woman ever to be nominated in the category. She played the role of Mollie, an Indigenous Osage woman who is married to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Ernest, in Martin Scorsese’s film.

She had been considered the Oscar frontrunner alongside Emma Stone, but it was Stone who went on to win the Academy Award for her performance as Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’s dark comedy.

While many fans were dismayed by Gladstone’s loss, she said that when she returned home to the Blackfeet Nation, nobody there was upset that she didn’t win.

“It was funny, the organizers of the event called me beforehand and they said that they’d got a bunch of little cardboard cut-outs of gold-man statues that looked like an Oscar, to give to the kids,” Gladstone recently told Empire magazine.

“They asked if that was okay, or if it was gonna hurt my feelings. I said: ‘No, absolutely not.’ That’s just the whole thing of award campaigns and the competitive nature of pitting art against art. Clearly this film, in this moment, had meaning. It did its job.”

She continued: “But yeah, nobody was upset that it didn’t happen. I feel like when the Golden Globe happened, a lot of people who are very far away from the industry just kind of thought it was the Oscars.”

Gladstone made history at the January Golden Globes with her win for Best Performance by a Female Actor in Motion Picture, Drama.

“It’s about the fact that [the film has] been awarded and it’s historic, and it’s still just a really meaningful moment,” she added. “So it’s irrelevant whether or not I walked home with that statue in hand.”

She said that “regardless of how things turned out”, she still has projects coming out and many more lined up.

Gladstone currently stars alongside Riley Keough in the Hulu true-crime series Under the Bridge, about the grisly murder of Canadian teen Reena Virk in 1997.

Up next, she will feature in Morrisa Maltz’s Jazzy, which will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on 9 June. The movie follows the scene-stealing character who appeared in the 2022 indie drama The Unknown Country, led by Gladstone.

Meanwhile, on 28 June, Gladstone’s drama Fancy Dance will be released on Apple TV+.

Last month, it was announced that Gladstone had been cast in Andrew Ahn’s forthcoming remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 Oscar-nominated romcom The Wedding Banquet.