When the actor Lily Gladstone was in high school, her classmates voted her “Most Likely to Win an Oscar”. Fast-forward to this year, it seemed like they were right on the money. In Martin Scorsese’s sprawling epic Killers of the Flower Moon, she was Mollie, an Osage woman experiencing the systematic slaughter of her oil-rich family. She was warm, flirtatious, grief-stricken, stoic. Such was the power of her performance, its careful grace and wisps of spiky humour, she stole the film right from under Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.
Gladstone had won the Golden Globe. She’d won precursor awards from critics in places as far-flung as Florida and Dublin. The metaphorical confetti cannons were at the ready. But when Emma Stone ended up taking home Best Actress at the Oscars instead, for her equally marvellous work in Poor Things, a specific narrative was foisted onto Gladstone. She became, in some circles at least, “the one that missed out”.
