It’s no risky bet to anticipate some awards season buzz whenever Martin Scorsese starts cooking, but ever since that first trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon came into play, Lily Gladstone’s acclimation to that lucrative golden statuette has all but seemingly been written in the stars.
Indeed, at this point in time, Gladstone looks to be the heavy favorite for Best Actress at next year’s Oscars ceremony thanks to her role as Mollie Burkhart—an Osage woman and the wife of the treacherous Ernest—in the film, and just as well, the praise for Gladstone’s work and character hasn’t slowed down even a little bit since we first caught a glimpse of her.
In a recent featurette from Empire, star Leonardo DiCaprio, who portrays Ernest in Killers of the Flower Moon, mused on the importance of Gladstone’s character, referencing how the role of Mollie comes with the weight of a story of an entire people.
Mollie is really the heroine in a lot of ways. She embodies the pain of the Osage people.
Gladstone’s potential competition for Best Actress includes the likes of Carey Mulligan (Maestro), Emma Stone (Poor Things), Greta Lee (Past Lives), and Fantasia Barrino (The Color Purple), but beyond how uniquely riveting her performance is promising to be, her role boasts a markedly palpable x-factor that makes her status as the favorite not only warranted but probably prophetic as well.
Indeed, most all of the nominee favorites come from films that, largely, focus on deeply personal stories that only symbolically relate to something bigger. That isn’t the case with Gladstone; together with the fact that the story of the Osage murders is a true, heinous piece of history that the world has a responsibility to not forget or ignore, Mollie Burkhart represents a very real, very specific pain that extends far past herself, past the characters in the story, and into the real world. Simply put, the task presented to Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon was perhaps easily the most herculean one out of all the nominees, and given how magnificently she seems to have completed it, there’s no just world where Gladstone doesn’t get the Best Actress Oscar.
Killers of the Flower Moon will release to theaters on Oct. 20, and will land on Apple TV+ at a yet undetermined date.
(featured image: Paramount Pictures)
