First-time Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone has made it to the ceremony.
The actor walked the red carpet at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre tonight in a strapless midnight-blue velvet gown by Gucci. The standout piece has an attached cape train, which featured a white flowerlike pattern embroidered all over. For jewelry, they wore matching flower-shaped earrings and a beaded necklace.
Gladstone, who uses she/them pronouns, has several movies under their belt, but had their big break last year, with their leading role in Martin Scorsese’s historic drama Killers of the Flower Moon, which they starred in opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. In it, they portray Mollie Kyle, a real-life woman of the Osage Nation, who married a white American, Ernest Burkhart, in 1917—and later discovered his involvement in an infamous string of murders that killed her family and many other Osage Indians.
Gladstone has Indigenous roots, having been raised on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana, and Seattle. They are of Piegan Blackfeet, Nez Perce, and European heritage. At this year’s Golden Globes, they became the first Indigenous woman to win Best Actress in a Motion Picture.
The actor received a standing ovation as they made their way onstage at the Beverly Hilton to accept the award in January. They began their speech with a few sentences in Siksiká, the language of the Blackfeet nation they belong to, and went on to express their appreciation for their nation and other Native cultures in the United States, and to note how far Indigenous representation in Hollywood has come, thanks to allies and brave voices.
“Thank you, Marty. Thank you, Leo,” they said to Scorsese and DiCaprio. “You are all changing things, and thank you for being allies.”
With 10 nods, Killers of the Flower Moon is the third-most nominated film at the 96th Academy Awards, behind only Oppenheimer, which has 13 nominations, and Poor Things, which has 11. And close behind it is Barbie, with eight nominations.
