What Lily Gladstone's Oscar loss means

Since Lily Gladstone’s Oscar nomination was announced in January, Native people have been buzzing about what would happen in the instance of her win. It was unspoken, really, that she’d become the first Native Oscar-winning actor. Her loss, we spoke of with ancestral disgust. Flipping couches, punching TVs, mobbing the Academy office in Hollywood. It was all farce because, as far as we were concerned, she would win. It was undeniable that the film industry needed to make amends with Native people – for the way we’ve been portrayed, from savages to Tiger Lillies, across the last two-centuries of its development. The stakes of Lily Gladstone’s win went beyond a nominal award: It was an acknowledgement of where Native people stand in today’s media landscape. It was an unspoken agreement, which Hollywood broke (again), that Native people have played a major role – one worthy of a “leading” acknowledgement – in the history of film. When Gladstone lost the award this Sunday, it felt like a “gotcha!” moment to all the NDNs (like me) who thought she would snag the award. But Gladstone wasn’t just competing against the other nominees — she was competing against history. 

Lily Gladstone in The New Yorker

Toni Morrison said it best in her essay, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,”: 

Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range… is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested.

Morrison was, of course, referring to the literary canon, but isn’t that what this moment in Oscars history was? “The clash of cultures?” The “building, defense, and debate” of the film canon?

It was hard not to be bitter when Emma Stone accepted the award, with what looked like genuine surprise. She’s not the problem, and I don’t mean to implicate her as the scapegoat for what is ultimately a systemic flaw in the Academy’s categorical notion of prestige — which has, for the past 96 years, chosen to celebrate white mediocrity instead of reckoning with their role in the continuing exclusion of Native people. 

There were a few red flags re: Killer of the Flower Moon and its Oscar nomination. The most obvious being that Scorsese, an Italian director, spearheaded the movie about murders in the Osage nation. His directorial vision was all-encompassing, a three-hour and twenty six-minute epic that (quite successfully) attempted to dissect the murders through a prismatic lens. Without him, it’s possible that Gladstone, as Mollie Burkhart, wouldn’t have been nominated to begin with. As the film’s tour de force, Mollie tries to save her community — just like Gladstone, who was primed to be a kind of Christ figure in the Native film industry, sent to save us from invisibility. The movie was well-executed, but it was impossible not to wonder how different the final version would have been if it were directed, adapted, or edited by a Native person. Let’s not get into the rabbit hole of identity politics but, ultimately, can a white person direct a movie that’s centered around Native people’s genocide? (That’s rhetorical, I have no idea of the answer, and if I did, dear reader, you’d be the last the know.)

The second red flag was the heavy-marketing of this Oscar ceremony as the first one in history in which a Native person could win a major award. This is no shade to the Osage performers, the drum circle and dancers — and all the shade to the Academy, who had me ki-yi-ying, prematurely celebrating, in my living room only to the give the award to a white woman. 

The third red flag was the fact that people argued Poor Things is a feminist film to begin with. And that Emma Stone (as a kind of Jonathan-Swiftian woman with the emotional age of an infant and the sexual empowerment of Amy Schumer) delivered a better performance than Gladstone. Critics of Gladstone’s listed such complaints: She didn’t have enough presence; her performance didn’t have enough emotional range — a la, Stoic Indian trope; and she didn’t have enough screen time in the film to be deserving of a “lead” nomination. To you who are nodding along, perhaps time would be better spent wondering why Native women have historically relegated to such roles. Must we always be sad, and scared, protecting our family from Western settlers? Must we experience that reality twice— in life and on the screen? When will it be our turn to see joy portrayed, and not defeat?

We fight for land, for water rights, for sovereignty – and this is by no means as important, but isn’t it? The “terrain,” as Morrison suggests, is that of history, and the stakes are our place in being recognized, in being represented. Will future generations be able to locate Native people in the prestige-film canon? Our cultural legacy is shaped by our visibility — and on the other hand, invisibility. We’ve co-opted new kinds of media, film and television, and new ways of storytelling in order to affirm our existence: to let people know that we’re still here. The Academy, and their primary part in shaping the canon, denied that to Gladstone – and by extension, to the Native community.