Lily Gladstone at the 2024 Oscars. Photo: Reuters
The Oscars may be a great American tradition, but in 96 years they haven't gotten around to honoring one of their locals. If Lily Gladstone had won best actress for her role in Killers of the Flower Moon at yesterday's ceremony — or if Scott George had taken best original song for «Wahjaje» («A Song for My People») from the same film — they would became the first Native Americans to receive a competitive Oscar in the history of the event. But none of them did. Instead, Emma Stone won Best Actress and Billie Eilish won Best Original Song. Both already had Oscars on the shelf at home.
On a night that largely went as expected, Gladstone's loss came as a shock — not least because she won a similar prize last month at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, whose voters closely mirror those of the Oscars. But it was stranger than the bookmakers' favourite, who simply didn't make it on the night. After all, Hollywood has spent the last decade obsessed with diversity. So why can't he still bring himself to check that particular box?
The film business was largely built on stories that featured a significant portion of Native American characters. From the 1940s to the 1960s, Westerns made up about a quarter of Hollywood's total production. But then, and since then, studios have been extremely reluctant to create stars from this particular demographic.
Gladstone, who grew up on the Blackfoot Reservation in Montana, was (and remains) a particularly good candidate to buck this trend: as Molly Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon, she holds her own onscreen, for goodness sake, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. . But as an actress, she could also help the Academy overcome its most notorious association with Native American culture to date.
It was the Sasha Littlefeather debacle that began at the 1973 Oscars when a 26-year-old woman in native dress walked onto the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. She stood in for Marlon Brando and came on his behalf to refuse the Best Actor award — in protest both against Hollywood's formulaic portrayal of Native Americans and the ongoing siege between the US Marshals, the FBI and the American Indian Movement in the South Town of Wounded Knee. Dakota.
Sasha Littlefeather receives Marlon Brando's Oscar. Photo: Bettmann
Littlefeather's onstage image as a beautiful, vulnerable interloper was undeniably powerful, and the stunt caused a fair amount of outrage that the Academy later decided it had to atone for. In 2022, the organization wrote a formal letter to Littlefeather apologizing for the reception of her appearance — «The offense you have suffered as a result of this statement was unjustified and unjustified,» it said — and later organized a gala «evening of reflection» at the Academy Museum , in which Littlefeather was the guest of honor and the apology was read aloud.
However, after her death three months later, it was revealed that Littlefeather, whose real name was Maria Luisa Cruz, was in fact of white Spanish-Mexican descent — and, according to her two sisters, her claim to Native American ancestry had been false all along . In addition, the widely circulated anecdote that former Western star John Wayne had to restrain himself from attacking her backstage at a ceremony in 1973 has been rather convincingly debunked.
In a business that knows the value of good optics, voters must have realized that a Gladstone victory would go a long way toward cleaning up this mess—at least it would finally put the Native American in his place. on the winner's podium who was actually a) the winner and b) a Native American. And because of the industry's broader ambivalence toward local artists, such opportunities are rare.
Lily Gladstone and DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon Posted by Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple
The closest they came the night before last was at the 2019 ceremony, when veteran Cherokee actor Wes Studi was presented with an Academy Honorary Award. Why honorary and not competitive? Because while Studi has worked regularly since his breakthrough appearance opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in 1992's The Last of the Mohicans, none of Studi's individual roles have been prominent enough to make the cast wake up and take notice. pay attention to yourself.
For Indian actors this is par for the course. A survey last year by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that of the 1,600 most successful films released in theaters between 2007 and 2022, only one—the 2020 X-Men spinoff The New Mutants—starred played by Native Americans. (That was 28-year-old part-time Oglala Lakota actress Blue Hunt.) More broadly, only a quarter of one percent of the speaking roles in all of these films were played by native actors, which, compared to the broader US population, means the group was underrepresented more than eight times. (Native Americans make up approximately 2 percent of American citizens.)
A win for Gladstone might have helped move the needle on that issue, although the road from Oscar breakthrough to meaningful or even stable work hasn't been a smooth one lately. After all the jubilation over Troy Kotsur's Best Supporting Actor win for Coda in 2022, the deaf star has now landed a role in one more film: a psychological thriller due out next year. Or take Yalitza Aparicio, who in 2019 became the first indigenous Mexican woman to be nominated for her performance in Rome. After obediently completing the circuit, she returned to work in her home country: Hollywood loved her, but not enough to offer her a job.
Some expected Lily Gladstone to win best actress tonight, and after the #Oscers statue was lost by Emma Stone, Lily's Killers of the Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese consoled his star and hugged her tightly. pic.twitter.com/C1pnmZQGDr
— Chris Gardner (@chrissgardner) March 11, 2024
It wasn't always like this. Golden Age Hollywood may have been far from an equal-opportunity utopia, but in those days, Oscar pioneers had great hope of turning their wins into long-term careers. During the decidedly unwoke 1950s, José Ferrer built a prolific career that spanned four decades, thanks to his supporting actor nomination in the 1948 film Joan of Arc. (Just two years after that, he immediately won the award for Best Actor for his role as Cyrano de Bergerac.)
Then there was Hattie McDaniel, who in 1940 became the first black actress to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind. True, in many of the 21 films she made in the ensuing decade, she played maids and maids: for McDaniel, opportunity in Hollywood required pandering to stereotypes that her own success theoretically challenged. But, like any actor, she could only work in the time in which she lived. «Damn, I'd rather play a maid than be one,» she once told a friend.
The times Gladstone finds herself in may seem much more progressive than McDaniel's. But it's worth noting that even the best recent films that give a platform to Native American talent—Riley Keough and Gina Gammell's «War Pony» and Chloe Zhao's «Songs My Brother Taught Me» and «The Rider»—overwhelmingly tend to be small, independently produced stories about the reservation. life.
Gladstone is an extremely talented actress who may now be doubly determined to bring indigenous characters to the screen. But even without an Oscar, there's no reason why she couldn't also star in, say, the new Dungeons & The film «Dragons», or a Blumhouse horror film about a haunted puppet. Awards season or not, that's the challenge of inclusivity: the less obvious it is, the more sincere it tends to be.
Свежие комментарии