Lily Gladstone Says Her ‘Killers Of The Moon’ Oscars Loss Is “Irrelevant,” As The Film “Did Its Job”

Killers of the Flower Moon breakout star Lily Gladstone recently reflected on losing the Oscar for Best Actress to Emma Stone earlier this year, who nabbed the award for her performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things.

According to Gladstone, it was no loss at all.

In an interview with Empire magazine, the actress explained how her supporters back home reacted to the news.

“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,” she said. “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.”

Gladstone was a top contender for the Oscar after winning both a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award for her turn as Mollie Kyle in the Martin Scorsese-directed epic.

“But yeah, nobody was upset that it didn’t happen,” she said. “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. It’s about the fact that the film has been awarded and it’s historic, and it’s still just a really meaningful moment. So it’s irrelevant whether or not I walked home with that statue in hand.”

The actress also revealed that her tribe and the confederacy it’s a part of organized a Lily Gladstone Day to celebrate her. “Getting to witness what the impact [of Killers Of The Flower Moon] was, going home to Montana and really having this moment shared by my tribe… it was amazing,” she said.

Gladstone also denied that the Oscar loss had much of an impact on her career, saying, “Regardless of how things turned out, I have work coming out and I have work lined up.”

The actress has since starred in the Hulu series Under the Bridge opposite Riley Keough, with much more on the way. She also stars in Fancy Dance, an indie film from Native writer and director Erica Tremblay about a Native American woman who kidnaps her niece to search for her missing sister.

Gladstone credits Killers of the Flower Moon with opening “up this space on-screen” for Indigenous creators.

“Now audiences want to see and fall in love with us,” she said.